F5 Advanced WAF vs Radware Cloud WAF Service comparison

F5 and Radware are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5, while Radware is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.7. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Radware users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

F5 Advanced WAF and Radware Cloud WAF Service compete in the web application firewall category. F5 Advanced WAF seems to have the upper hand due to its versatile capabilities, including seamless integration with proprietary modules and advanced threat detection features, while Radware Cloud WAF Service excels in efficient bot management and user-friendly automation.

Features: F5 Advanced WAF offers advanced DDoS protection, behavior analysis, and integration with proprietary modules, which users appreciate for stability and flexibility. IP intelligence and dynamic logging are frequently highlighted. Radware Cloud WAF Service is known for efficient bot management, user-friendly automation capabilities, and optional API security, making it easy to protect against known threats.

Room for Improvement: F5 Advanced WAF users often mention the need to improve reporting features and the complexity of its interface design. Simplifying integration and enhancing pricing structures are also recommended. Radware Cloud WAF users desire improved integration capabilities and better API data flow visibility. Enhanced reporting for DDoS analysis and easier rule configuration would also benefit the product.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 Advanced WAF is primarily on-premises, with some hybrid cloud options, allowing versatile configurations but posing challenges in configuration complexity and support consistency. Radware Cloud WAF Service, primarily cloud-based, offers streamlined deployment and integration with commendable support that reduces operational overhead.

Pricing and ROI: F5 Advanced WAF is perceived as high-priced but offers significant ROI through robust security and compliance benefits, suitable for modular deployments. Radware Cloud WAF Service provides a cost-effective option with competitive pricing, especially appealing for scalable solutions, offering ROI through streamlined management and effective threat mitigation.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Radware Cloud WAF Service Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Radware Cloud WAF Service

January 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

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.

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Werner Lunow

CISO at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The interface is easy to use, and the solution protects us from OWASP Top Ten threats

DDoS protection was the critical feature we wanted when we decided to go with Radware. The company faced many DDoS attacks at the time, and we didn't have a solution. It's not the only reason we chose Cloud WAF. We do use it for other use cases. Cloud WAF's interface is easy to use and protects us from OWASP Top Ten threats. Our dev team do QA checks on applications before they go live, but Cloud WAF creates an additional security layer on our website. The solution protects against multiple threat types. We see SQL injection attacks and DDoS probes constantly. Attackers attempt multiple queries and enumeration attacks against our applications. We previously had a basic firewall with an IPS feature set, but it wasn't providing the same level of protection we get from the WAF. CloudWAF matches things automatically and identifies any threats. It seems to be doing its job. We sometimes have strange code-related behavior. When our developers write some poorly written code, it generates events in Cloud WAF. It's generally effective at detecting. We had an issue with a misconfigured rule where it blocked legitimate traffic. Overall, we haven't had many issues with it in the last three years. We leave it alone.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

"The solution's most valuable features include application DDoS protection, bot blocking, and HTTP header verifications."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the overall capabilities, there is not a comparable solution on the market."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the easy identification of events and customization. We can pinpoint our settings."

"There are a lot of good features."

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

"The solution is easily accessible on mobile and laptop devices."

"It's scalable and very easy to manage."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"From a financial point of view, we no longer need to appropriate more horsepower to our backend web servers constantly to service these requests because Cloud WAF is preventing malicious bots from accessing our web page. It reduced the load on our backend."

"The solution offers good protection."

"With the current visibility dashboard, we can now obtain insight into the nature of attacks, identify attackers, and detect top IP or threat regions."

"Cloud WAF's interface is easy to use and protects us from OWASP Top Ten threats. Our dev team do QA checks on applications before they go live, but Cloud WAF creates an additional security layer on our website."

"DDoS protection is a valuable feature that works efficiently."

"The most valuable feature is the monitoring dashboard that we access through the portal."

"What makes this a comprehensive offering from Radware is that it combines WAF, ADA, bot management, and API protection, which is not currently available from any other provider in the market."

"The API Discovery is also very good because the application is outsourced, which means that we don't have the code. API Discovery allowed me to discover precisely how to orchestrate the API so that I could see the results."

More Radware Cloud WAF Service pros

Cons

"DNS Management."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"Compatibility with multiple cloud environments needs improvement. Both stability and scalability need to be improved."

"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."

"More legacy protocols should be added to the solution."

"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."

"There should be more ability to rate limit certain scenarios. The majority of the time, it is either on or off. For certain types of use cases, there should be the ability to rate limit, not just enable or disable."

"People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux"

"The interface is old-looking, it's not modern, which is why it's not always comfortable to use."

"The solution could improve by having an independent capture module. It has a built feature that you can deploy the capture on your published website. However, it's not very user-friendly. When you compare this feature to Google Capture or other enterprise captures, they are very simple. It needs a good connection to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. When you implement this feature in the data center, you may suffer some complications with connecting to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. This should be improved in the future."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"Radware's bot manager can be improved because it's very complicated to implement for apps. Radware could also add alerts by WhatsApp or Telegram. It only sends notifications via email or SMS."

"They have a portal for webinar training but because we are in a Spanish-speaking country, it is difficult for us to watch them. Not all of us are fluent in English, but most of the courses and webinars are in English. That part could be improved..."

"API integration and documentation need to be improved. There should be more detailed documentation for API usage, rate limiting, CNAME, and DDoS functions. A lot of articles need to be added to their portal."

"We've had some issues with putting certificates in."

"Radware Cloud WAF Service should provide SSL certificates for its hosting customers."

"If we want to publish services to a limited number of providers and we only want those providers to connect, we need to forward those requests to the Radware support team and they apply them, but it takes some time."

"The connection between the front and back ends could be improved."

"The lower-level technical team at Radware could improve their approach to problem-solving as they sometimes are very slow."

More Radware Cloud WAF Service cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"We are using the free version."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."

"Its price is fair. We have done a couple of deals where they were able to give some kind of discount to the customers. The price was initially high for the customers, but after a couple of negotiations, it came within their budget. They were happy with that."

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

"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."

"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."

"It is expensive. Its price should be better. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. Its licensing is also based on the model. There are no additional costs."

"There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support."

"There is an annual subscription for this solution."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"The price is a bulk average."

"I am not directly involved in pricing and setup cost discussions, but it seems that Radware offers a more cost-effective solution compared to F5. It is considered a good value for our budget."

"When compared to Akamai and F5, Radware's pricing and licensing are highly competitive."

"The pricing is fair."

"I believe the prices are fair."

"We are paying $20,000 annually for six licenses that provide basic WAF functionality."

"Radware Cloud WAF Service falls within a mid-range price bracket compared to other web application firewall solutions."

"If you plan to deploy Cloud WAF, keep in mind that the product is priced based on the megabits of traffic that pass through and the number of transactions. You should get your requirements correct up front. The active attackers feed and CDN services cost extra, so you need to negotiate these features upfront."

More Radware Cloud WAF Service pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Retailer

10%

Financial Services Firm

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 setup cost is normal, yet not the best in terms of the commercial aspect. Other competitors like Fortinet are che...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

One improvement for AOF could be focusing on enhancing its AI engine to make it more mature.

See all answers

What do you like most about Radware Cloud WAF Service?

One of the most valuable features we have found in the solution is protection against attacks from botnet networks an...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Cloud WAF Service?

I am not directly involved in pricing and setup cost discussions, but it seems that Radware offers a more cost-effect...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Radware Cloud WAF Service?

API integration and documentation need to be improved. There should be more detailed documentation for API usage, rat...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 21% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 14% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 7% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 4% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Radware Cloud WAF Service

Compared 31% of the time

AWS WAF vs Radware Cloud WAF Service

Compared 30% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Radware Cloud WAF Service

Compared 15% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Radware Cloud WAF Service

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Radware Cloud WAF Service

Compared 6% of the time

More Radware Cloud WAF Service Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Radware Cloud WAF Service

January 2025

Download Radware Cloud WAF Service product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

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.

Radware’s Cloud WAF provides enterprise-grade, continuously adaptive web application security protection. Based on Radware’s ICSA Labs certified, market-leading web application firewall, it provides full coverage of OWASP Top-10 threats and zero-day attacks, while implementing both negative and positive web application security models to automatically adapt protections to evolving threats and protected assets.

Radware’s Cloud WAF offers full web security protection including OWASP Top-10 coverage, advanced attack protection and 0-day attack protection by implementing both negative and positive web application security models. It provides organizations “frictionless” application protection by automatically detecting and protecting new web applications as they are added to the network through automatic policy generation technology.

Radware

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Radware Cloud WAF Service

January 2025

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. Radware Cloud WAF Service

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Radware Cloud WAF Service and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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