

Radware Alteon and F5 Advanced WAF compete in the application delivery and security category. F5 Advanced WAF appears to have an edge due to its extensive security features, though Radware Alteon offers strong value propositions through its ease of use and cost-effectiveness.
Features: Radware Alteon is known for its SSL-TLS acceleration, seamless stability, and integrated application protection. F5 Advanced WAF features advanced threat detection, bot protection, and comprehensive application security catering to high-security needs.
Room for Improvement: Radware Alteon can improve its automation and DNS integration along with user interface simplicity. F5 Advanced WAF needs enhancements in reporting, integration with third-party tools, and deployment process simplification.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Radware Alteon offers straightforward deployment in on-premise environments but faces challenges with cloud setups. Its support is good though response times could improve. F5 Advanced WAF, requiring more expertise due to its complexity, has efficient customer service with high knowledge satisfaction.
Pricing and ROI: Radware Alteon provides a cost-effective pricing structure, particularly with the Global Elastic License, delivering strong ROI through reliability and cost savings. F5 Advanced WAF, while more expensive, justifies costs with premium security features, resulting in good ROI especially for enterprises needing advanced protection.
Time savings in daily operations come from the automatic learning and signature update reducing the need for constant manual rule management, allowing the security and network teams to spend significantly less time handling false positive application-related escalations.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
While they resolve issues well, the time taken for responses to non-critical issues should be shorter.
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
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.
The customer service and support are excellent.
If you need to scale up, such as moving from a lower model to a higher one, the configuration from the lower model can be migrated easily without issues.
I can run it in HA mode or even divide the traffic volume to the number of instances that I have based on their resource sizing.
It handles peak loads and thousands of concurrent connections without exceeding 10% utilization.
We have it deployed across multiple geographic locations, benefiting from load balancing resiliency.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.
F5 Advanced WAF has been very reliable and consistent for us; in our on-premise enterprise setup, it has been stable and predictable in day-to-day operations without any unexpected crashes or WAF-related downtime in production.
F5 Advanced WAF is stable, and there is no doubt it is one of the best WAFs in the market.
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
We've never faced downtime, even during peak transaction hours.
There is minimal downtime, and the solution is quite stable.
There are no difficulties with the deployment of Radware Alteon; it is quite straightforward.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
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.
Another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients.
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.
In the future, I would like to see some other security features added, such as DDoS, which is Distributed Denial of Service.
Licensing is capacity-driven, so you need careful planning based on traffic volume and use cases, and adding features such as Bot Protection impacts costs; once licensing is clear and sized correctly, there are no surprises.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
For our solution, it was right in the middle of price performance.
The cost of the Radware solution is reasonable and stable.
The implementation and running costs are quite high.
The Advanced Attack Signature database is very strong and regularly updated, effectively blocking SQL injections, cross-site scripting, command injections, and file inclusion attacks while allowing selective enabling or disabling of signatures to avoid blocking genuine traffic.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
It contains the logic of both negative and positive security combined.
The product allows us to manage multiple networks and VLANs into a single box and add numerous web services and farms efficiently.
The best feature of Radware Alteon is basically the configuration; how we configure it is very straightforward, and it is very simple to configure.
I find the best features to be the flexibility and ease of use.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 Advanced WAF | 3.4% |
| Radware Alteon | 1.8% |
| Other | 94.8% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 27 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 16 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 17 |
| Large Enterprise | 22 |
F5 Advanced WAF delivers robust web security with features like signature-based threat protection and behavior analysis, ensuring app stability and security.
F5 Advanced WAF integrates advanced security with functionalities such as SQL injection defense and real-time threat intelligence. It enhances security for applications with load balancing, bot detection, and DDoS protection alongside comprehensive attack monitoring capabilities. Popular among diverse sectors, its usability and easy integration make it a practical choice by providing a stable security infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud environments.
What are the key features?Particularly relevant in banking and financial services, F5 Advanced WAF safeguards applications from threats like SQL injections and DDoS attacks, ensuring compliance and API security. Its capabilities are leveraged for both load balancing and application defense, offering a versatile deployment model suited for protecting critical infrastructure in competitive and demanding industries.
Alteon is Radware’s application delivery and security platform for delivering and protecting applications across physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments. Available as hardware, virtual appliances cloud deployment, Alteon provides local, global server and link load balancing, advanced traffic management, SSL/TLS offload and acceleration, automation, and application optimization, including HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support.
Through Alteon Protect, organizations can combine Alteon application delivery and on-device security with Radware Cloud Application Protection services, including web application and API protection, bot management, and web DDoS protection. This provides a unified application delivery and security approach across data center and cloud environments.
Alteon supports flexible capacity and deployment through Global Elastic Licensing (GEL), which enables licensed capacity to be allocated and reallocated across supported Alteon deployments as application and infrastructure requirements change.
The platform also supports modern automation and AI-assisted operations. Alteon MCP Server enables application, DevOps, and platform teams to use natural-language intent through an MCP-compatible AI client to create supported Alteon configurations using a guided workflow that gathers required parameters, validates configuration state, and maintains human review and approval before changes are applied. Alteon also supports lifecycle automation and integration through REST APIs, Ansible, Terraform, and Kubernetes/cloud-native environments.
Together, these capabilities enable organizations to deliver, scale, automate, and protect applications consistently across data centers, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid environments.
Alteon supports flexible perpetual and subscription-based licensing models. Physical appliance pricing is based on the selected Alteon hardware platform and enabled performance/capacity, while virtual and cloud deployments can be licensed according to the required capacity as a subscription. Global Elastic Licensing (GEL) provides additional flexibility by allowing licensed capacity to be allocated and redistributed across supported Alteon physical, virtual, and cloud deployments rather than tying all capacity permanently to an individual instance.
Customers can also purchase application delivery together with cloud-delivered application protection through Alteon Protect, providing a combined subscription model for Alteon application delivery and Radware Cloud Application Protection capabilities.
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