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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
72
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
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool is user-friendly."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"The UI is good."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"The technical support is good."
"The solution isn't too expensive. The license allows you to license what you need and leave out what you don't need."
"It's flexible and powerful, and the users can input their own rules to the system."
"Web attack signatures are very important for detecting web attacks."
"The most valuable features of the F5 Advanced WAF are the enhanced ASM and the performance. Additionally, the usability and effectiveness are very good."
"The web application firewall itself is most valuable. It provides positive security and negative security. In negative security, it blocks a task such as cross-site scripting, code injection, etc. In positive security, it lets you specify and enforce things, such as the parameters allowed in username and password fields and the number of characters allowed in a field."
"F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements."
"Identification, ease of use, and ease of modifying it to most of our needs are valuable."
"There are a lot of good features."
"his solution allows me to secure applications, by blocking suspicious traffic based on the signature that has been enabled for that particular application."
"With Alteon, the load-balancing options are practically unlimited. We haven't had any issues with offloading, decryption, putting in cookies, or any other load-balancing features. We can check URLs, etc., on the back end for load balancing instead of running a TCP check. We're also doing some certificate stuff on there. Alteon covers all of the standard load-balancing techniques, and we employ most of them daily."
"The simplicity of the GUI is what I like the most about Radware Alteon."
"The best part is that we are able to manage it easily. It is easy to manage and easy to integrate with third-party applications."
"Overall, I would rate Alteon a nine out of ten."
"I find the best features to be the flexibility and ease of use. The configuration is very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the load-balancing reverse proxy."
"The interface is easy, it's friendly, and has good alerting."
 

Cons

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"The product could be more user-friendly, particularly the user interface for administrators."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve the precision of the scanning. There are many false positives. They should improve their threat database."
"There is a gap in report management."
"We get false positives sometimes."
"Support is a little slow."
"The user interface (UI) seems a bit outdated. Making it more user-friendly would be beneficial."
"The administrator's user interface and some of the settings can sometimes be very complicated to understand."
"The deployment side is quite complex."
"The user interface can be improved."
"Performance could be improved."
"Radware LinkProof's marketing efforts need improvement to raise awareness about its capabilities and compete effectively in the market."
"The resolution time could be faster."
"They keep integrating new features that sometimes break our production, but we use clustered systems, so we can test those software releases. However, sometimes they take a while to reach us. We have had to work with Radware to remedy issues on their side that they have verified."
"The solution could be more open to additional third-party add-ons being integrated into it."
"There is room for improvement in reducing the number of false positives I receive. We could benefit from more configuration options to avoid these false positives, which can be overwhelming for a security analyst."
"I would like to see more educational and training sessions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"As far as the pricing of F5 Advanced WAF I would rate it a four out of five depending on what features I am looking for. Imperva is more expensive."
"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."
"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."
"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."
"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."
"It's more expensive than other solutions and depending on the modules, there can be additional fees."
"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."
"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."
"The Radware team we work with always gives us the best price. As a university, our budget is limited. We need something that is the best solution but with a low or economical pricing. We are getting a better price than competitors. The shift from Barracuda to Alteon was primarily due to cost efficiency. It is very economical, and the price fits our business needs."
"Alteon's price is excellent compared to other solutions. F5 costs around twice as much. We still have about three years left before this hardware reaches the end of its life. We're migrating to the cloud, and phasing some of this out, but it's nice that they've given us a long window to keep their hardware in place."
"We have three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain more discounts. It seems to be a much cheaper alternative."
"Our government agency opted for Radware Alteon due to its affordability and efficiency. While I can't say precisely how much it costs the organization, the price per device. In India, we always look for affordable products, so I assume Alteon is cost-effective because the government chose it."
"The pricing seems reasonable to me for what the solution provides. It is within the parameters of this type of solution."
"Radware Alteon is less expensive than many of the other competitors."
"The solution is cost-efficient."
"The price conforms to what the tool provides. It is not an inexpensive tool and not all companies can afford an ADC solution such as Alteon. However, it justifies its price with the options it offers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
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?
The setup cost is normal, yet not the best in terms of the commercial aspect. Other competitors like Fortinet are che...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
One improvement for AOF could be focusing on enhancing its AI engine to make it more mature.
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: January 2025.
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