F5 Advanced WAF vs NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall comparison

F5 and NSFOCUS are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.4, while NSFOCUS is ranked #45. F5 holds a 6.0% mindshare in WAF, compared to NSFOCUS’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NSFOCUS users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF).

To learn more, read our detailed Web Application Firewall (WAF) Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

April 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 6.0%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF	6.0%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	4.7%
NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall	0.6%
Other	88.7%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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Kallamuddin Ansari

Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize

Application security has protected critical banking services while policy learning minimizes false blocks

F5 Advanced WAF performs well overall, but I have noticed some points that could enhance the solution. Initially, policy tuning could be simpler, as while the learning engine is powerful, initial tuning still requires experienced engineers, which can be challenging for new teams due to the complexity of options and parameters. A more guided and simple tuning workflow would help reduce the learning curve. Additionally, tighter native integration with SIEM or SOAR tools would simplify correlation and investigations for security teams, although log exports are available. Overall, these are not blockers, merely enhancement opportunities, and once tuned, F5 Advanced WAF is very stable and reliable; improving usability, reporting, and onboarding would make it even more effective for larger environments.

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it_user933945

Desktop Engineer at eros international media ltd

Offers Application Protection Against Web Attacks

There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."

"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."

"There is a huge signature repository"

"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."

"The initial setup process is simple."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"F5 Advanced WAF has very good stability and scalability. Its initial setup was straightforward."

"The product is used to secure web applications and has the ability to use API templates and bot protection features, such as blocking requests or presenting CAPTCHA pages to end users."

"The valuable features vary from customers to customers. Some customers are okay with the basic features of the WAF, and some customers use advanced WAF with a few other features."

"F5 technical support is excellent. They are experts who always provide the right solution, and they understand the problem. Their response and resolution times are good."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its ability to have a pool of resources that can distribute your traffic, and that is a plus for me. My company tried to look into a competitor, Imperva, but it was lacking that capability, so F5 Advanced WAF outperforms Imperva."

"In terms of F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features, I would definitely say its stability, as F5 is one of the most stable products and either as the load balancer or the web application firewall, it is very stable."

"With F5 Advanced WAF, it was protection for online publications and for our customers that caused us to choose the platform."

"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"Since we are using this tool for protection purposes we really appreciate the hybrid security abilities; the main idea here is that we powerful protection our application needs."

"We really appreciate the hybrid security abilities; we get powerful protection for our application needs."

Cons

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."

"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"Its stability could be better."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The solution is tedious. It takes a lot of discrete settings so one needs to get detailed and granular when they use the solution."

"This solution can be made more user-friendly."

"F5 needs to improve API protection with a single F5 solution, without requiring additional modules."

"The pricing could be more flexible."

"There is a learning curve that extends the time of implementation."

"For F5 Advanced WAF, it's only 70% different over time with upgrades. F5 can still build AWS support after many long years of absence."

"The administrator's user interface and some of the settings can sometimes be very complicated to understand."

"I would like for there to be a cloud-based solution, this would also help to improve scalability."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features."

"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not too pricey."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is too high."

"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."

"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."

"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"

"I am not sure about pricing but licenses are available on Google."

"I think the price is very high."

"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."

"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	31

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

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What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

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What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?

It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the r...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is a bit higher, but not that high. I would say for a good amount of revenue-generati...

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What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

On the features I wish existed, Big-IP Advanced WAF is primarily an on-premises solution and in that solution, there ...

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Compared 30% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

April 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

April 2026

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

April 2026

Download NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

NSFOCUS WAF, NSFOCUS Web Application Security

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.

F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.

NSFOCUS understands how critical your web servers and applications are to your business and we have designed a closed-loop web application security solution to protect you from web attacks, data breaches and downtime. This solution includes website protection through our Web Application Firewall (WAF) and pro-active vulnerability assessment using our Web Vulnerability Scanning System (WVSS).

NSFOCUS

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

2016 G20 Summit

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

April 2026

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