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F5 Advanced WAF vs Radware Alteon comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Cloudflare enhances performance, reduces operational costs, and boosts revenue, with reported benefits of $903,000 over three years.
Sentiment score
7.8
F5 Advanced WAF provides high ROI through security, compliance, scalability, and low overhead, justifying investment especially in finance.
Sentiment score
7.6
Radware Alteon users see significant ROI with improved traffic management, support, and automation, favoring renewals for technological maturity.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Cloudflare's service is praised for responsiveness, but some users face delays, often relying on extensive documentation for solutions.
Sentiment score
7.1
F5 Advanced WAF is praised for expertise and dedication, though response time improvements for initial queries are suggested.
Sentiment score
7.4
Radware Alteon is praised for responsive support and quick issue resolution, despite some time zone and response challenges.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
You can get a support engineer with the best qualifications.
I have interacted with F5's support, and while I have no major complaints, they could improve.
We never face support issues, and their team resolves any critical issues quickly once they are involved.
There is a dedicated expert answering even the toughest questions.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Cloudflare's scalable architecture is praised for efficient traffic handling, seamless expansion, and meeting diverse enterprise needs globally.
Sentiment score
7.6
F5 Advanced WAF scales efficiently, supports diverse environments, and suits medium to large enterprises with excellent load balancing.
Sentiment score
8.0
Radware Alteon excels in scalability and adaptability, offering seamless bandwidth and throughput increases in global and enterprise environments.
I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten because I had no issues with it.
I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.
It handles peak loads and thousands of concurrent connections without exceeding 10% utilization.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Users praise Cloudflare for improved reliability, effective DDoS protection, and excellent DNS services despite initial configuration needs.
Sentiment score
8.5
F5 Advanced WAF is highly stable, efficiently handles high traffic, and receives top ratings for reliability and security.
Sentiment score
8.2
Radware Alteon is lauded for exceptional stability, offering reliable performance and minimal disruptions despite occasional past issues.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
We've never faced downtime, even during peak transaction hours.
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare users seek better analytics, integration, support, pricing clarity, and enhanced features like caching and multi-user access.
F5 Advanced WAF requires intuitive UI, clearer reporting, seamless updates, better integration, and improved support with advanced features.
Radware Alteon requires UI updates, enhanced automation, proactive support, and improved integration for better user satisfaction and scalability.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
the ability to integrate with the on-site active directory instead of just AD through Azure AD
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
They keep integrating new features that sometimes break our production, but we use clustered systems, so we can test those software releases.
Other OEMs offer free courses and hands-on labs on new technologies and features, which we find useful.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare offers flexible pricing plans from free to $1,500 monthly, ideal for businesses of different sizes and traffic needs.
F5 Advanced WAF is costly but valued for robust features; pricing varies, challenging for small businesses yet negotiable.
Radware Alteon is cost-effective, competes with F5, offers flexible licensing, and combines hardware and support with good performance.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
It's cost-effective, but I think they should have a custom pricing model for enterprise customers based on the features you use.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
For our solution, it was right in the middle of price performance.
The cost of the Radware solution is reasonable and stable.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare enhances performance and security with CDN, caching, DDoS protection, easy DNS management, analytics, and intuitive interface.
F5 Advanced WAF enhances web security with anti-bot protection, behavior analysis, and flexible policy customization, featuring AI and load balancing.
Radware Alteon offers robust security, intuitive GUI, automation, and durable hardware for superior application performance and high service availability.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
The product allows us to manage multiple networks and VLANs into a single box and add numerous web services and farms efficiently.
I find the best features to be the flexibility and ease of use.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
Radware Alteon
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (5th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Richard Polyak - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable
Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.
MaverickHurley - PeerSpot reviewer
Makes it easier and quicker to spin up services when we deploy applications
The most valuable aspect is the ability to customize the types of load-balancing scenarios needed for customized applications. Some of the load balancers on the market today are strictly out-of-hand load balancers for SSL or HTTP. Radware Alteon is most useful for customizing in-house applications based on ports and protocols. Another great feature is integrated application protection. There are many features you can activate. Some of them are add-ons, such as WAF protection, DDoS, rate-limiting, and connections-per-second per application. We also use Radware where we do all the programming.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost, leading to amb...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
F5 Advanced WAF sells perpetual licenses as perpetual assets during sales without informing me that support ends afte...
What do you like most about Radware Alteon?
It saves us a lot of work in terms of management since it has tasks already defined automatically. That enables us to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Alteon?
We have a three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain mo...
What needs improvement with Radware Alteon?
It is a fairly complete service and it is difficult for me to think of what can be improved. A feature that I would l...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Alteon, Radware AppWall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Convergys
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Radware Alteon and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.