F5 Advanced WAF vs Reblaze - part of Link11 comparison

F5 and Reblaze are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5, while Reblaze is ranked #24 with an average rating of 8.5. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Reblaze users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Reblaze and F5 Advanced WAF compete in the market for web application security solutions. Reblaze has the upper hand in pricing and deployment flexibility, whereas F5 Advanced WAF dominates in advanced security features.

Features: Reblaze offers user-friendly dashboards, automatic threat management, and agile support to adapt to cloud architecture changes. F5 Advanced WAF provides robust anti-bot protection, behavior analysis, and comprehensive attack mitigation, with users appreciating its stability and detailed logging capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Reblaze could improve its reporting features, enhance its bot management tools, and add granularity to its WAF functionalities. F5 Advanced WAF's interface and reporting need to be more intuitive, with better dashboard aesthetics and a streamlined configuration process. Both products would benefit from a more streamlined user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Reblaze allows flexible deployment across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments and is praised for its responsive technical support. F5 Advanced WAF primarily offers on-premises deployment and, although its technical support is highly regarded, its cloud integration could be improved.

Pricing and ROI: Reblaze is considered affordable with predictable costs and flexible models, including MSSP solutions without extra fees. F5 Advanced WAF is more costly, with bundled services and licensing fees, but offers comprehensive protection that users view as good value despite the higher price point. Reblaze stands out for its attractive pricing, while F5 relies on feature richness for justifying its pricing.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Reblaze - part of Link11 Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Reblaze - part of Link11

January 2025

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Helped 831,020 peers since 2012

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.

Read full review

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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YacovHabusha

Network and Security Department Manager at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

Allowed us to replace our reverse proxy, load-balancing, and WAF products with one platform

Perhaps the automatic reporting could be better. I would like to have seen more automated reports. Maybe it has been improved in the last year and I'm just not aware of it. But from a managerial point of view, you want a summary report, a weekly report: How many attacks were blocked? How much bandwidth was saved due to the caching mechanism? What were the top-ten attacks that were tested on the network, etc? I could most likely have found all that data if I logged in to the system and ran different reports. It would be very helpful to get a management report on a weekly basis.

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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

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"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."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

"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."

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

More Cloudflare pros

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the security features and the protection."

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

"It is easy to obtain dashboard compliance because security policy views are included."

"The bot defense capability, as well as protection from brute force attacks and OWASP Top Ten, are notable features."

"This solution is an enterprise-class firewall that provides both load-balancing and security."

"We can monitor IP locations, but we have constraints from each country. It has a replication feature. Licenses can be shared, taking turns with each license."

"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 most valuable feature is artificial intelligence and to get extra internal access."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"I very much like the elastic search and reports, allowing us to have a 360-degree view of the customer's activities and enabling us to track down any suspicious bots."

"The main feature is using the rules and being able to see the traffic. It helps us find malicious traffic."

"The most valuable features were the real-time monitoring and the management. With this kind of product, you need a very good management system to allow you to see false positives in real-time; to see what's happening in real-time... The clarity stood out. It was very visible and very easy to navigate; very easy to find the data we were looking for."

"The feature I find most valuable is the user-friendly dashboard. It is easy to understand how everything works and it allows you to make decisions quickly and efficiently."

"The best thing about Reblaze, for us, is that it has been a game changer because previously, we were using Google's Web Application Firewall, but it wasn't up to the mark."

"Reblaze knows how to manage security. For me as, someone who knows little about security, it's good that I have a firm that optimizes everything according to their standards. It's their responsibility and they are fully hands-on."

"The real-time monitoring and reporting are very good. There are information updates in their portal every two minutes. They also have the ability to spill it into Sumo Logic, for example. It's very easy to use."

"It is a highly resilient product that can handle significantly larger workloads and high volumes of traffic with ease."

Cons

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."

"The pricing could be improved."

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

More Cloudflare cons

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

"The solution's dashboard could be improved. When you're moving from policy to policy, the logs and the integration of the logs in other systems aren't straightforward."

"Scalability could be improved."

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

"For me, an area for improvement in F5 Advanced WAF is the reporting as it isn't so clear. The vendor needs to work on the reporting capability of the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of F5 Advanced WAF is threat intelligence to protect your web application, particularly having that capability out-of-the-box, and not needing to pay extra for it, similar to what's offered in FortiWeb, for example, any request that originates from a malicious IP will be blocked automatically by FortiWeb. F5 Advanced WAF should have the intelligence for blocking malicious IPs, or automatically blocking threats included in the license, instead of making it an add-on feature that users have to pay for apart from the standard licensing fees."

"The BIG-IQ is supposed to centralize the management for all of the boxes but it's not very effective."

"It should be a little bit easy to deploy in terms of the overall deployment session. One of our customers is a bit unhappy about the reporting options. Currently, it automatically deletes event logs after some limit if a customer doesn't have any external Syslog server. It is a problem for those customers who want to review event logs after a week or so because they won't get proper reports or event logs. They should increase the duration to at least a month or two for storing the data on the device. F5 is not a leader in Gartner Quadrant, which affects us when we go and pitch this solution. Customers normally go and take a look at such annual reports, and because F5 is currently not there as a leader, the customers ask about it even though we are saying it is good in all things. F5 is not known for something totally different or unique. They were a major player in ADP, and they are just rebranding themselves into security. They should improve or increase their marketing as a security company now. They have already started to do that, but they should do it more so that when it comes to security, customers can easily remember F5. At the moment, if we say F5, load balancing comes to mind. With rebranding and marketing, all customers should get the idea that F5 is now mainly focusing on the security part of it, and it is a security company instead of load balancing. This is the first solution that should come to a customer's mind for a web application firewall."

"One thing that can be improved, is to increase the quantity over predefine policy."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"The WAF features are not as granular as we would expect from a WAF system. There should be more granularity and in-depth rules, out-of-the-box."

"Some of the settings on the dashboard are confusing."

"There is room for improvement in helping us understanding session management... We want Reblaze to catch and identify everything. We want to see the various devices doing one activity and to see, in a timeline, what's happened. We would like to see a more human-readable display to understand what's happening in the web app."

"They have an interface that you have to adjust to. That is a bit of a downfall because I expect an interface to be very intuitive for someone who knows little about security. But if you know about security, the interface is wonderful."

"I would like to have seen more automated reports. Maybe it has been improved in the last year and I'm just not aware of it. But from a managerial point of view, you want a summary report, a weekly report: How many attacks were blocked? How much bandwidth was saved due to the caching mechanism? What were the top-ten attacks that were tested on the network, etc? I could most likely have found all that data if I logged in to the system and ran different reports. It would be very helpful to get a management report on a weekly basis."

"The next release should have next-generation automation."

"We have multiple products behind different instances of Reblaze. We have one instance for staging and then we have a production instance for multiple products. One of the things that we have requested is a unified view panel, so that we can see each of the instances in a unified view. That way, we won't have to go bouncing from instance to instance."

"Up to now the only cons I could find is sometimes getting change management back on track, because it's a company that evolves, and sometimes I don't have the same needs that they have. But besides that, up until now, I am really pleased with their service and I've also recommended them to some of my clients."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

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

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"We are using the free version."

"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."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

"It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required."

"F5 Advanced WAF is not a cost-effective solution. Although they are attempting to reduce prices with their VE and cloud options, they are more expensive than other solutions. The solution is more expensive on average."

"F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."

"The cost is slightly above average."

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

"There is an annual subscription for this solution."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"On a monthly basis we pay $750."

"We found the cost to be a bit on the higher side, starting at approximately three to four thousand dollars for a small configuration."

"I believe that for the six instances we have right now, it's costing us $16,000 per month."

"There is still some room for improvement when it comes to bot management from Reblaze because they are relatively new compared to other vendors in the town."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

19%

Educational Organization

11%

Media Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

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...

See all answers

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 Reblaze?

It is a highly resilient product that can handle significantly larger workloads and high volumes of traffic with ease.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Reblaze?

We found the cost to be a bit on the higher side, starting at approximately three to four thousand dollars for a smal...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Reblaze?

There is a potential improvement regarding simplifying the complexity of rule creation. It would be beneficial if it ...

See all answers

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 21% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

January 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Reblaze - part of Link11

December 2024

Download Reblaze - part of Link11 product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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Cloudflare

Reblaze

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

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.

Reblaze is a cloud-based, fully managed protective shield for sites and web applications. Hostile traffic is blocked in the cloud, before it reaches the protected network.

Reblaze is a comprehensive web security solution, providing a next-gen WAF, DoS and DDoS protection, bot mitigation, scraping prevention, CDN, load balancing, and more.

The platform offers a unique combination of benefits. Machine learning provides accurate, adaptive threat detection. Dedicated Virtual Private Clouds ensure maximum privacy. Top-tier infrastructure assures maximum performance. Fine-grained ACLs enable precise traffic regulation. An intuitive web-based management console provides real-time traffic control. A one-month trial offer allows you to assess Reblaze with no cost, risk, or obligation.

Reblaze makes it effortless and affordable to secure and accelerate your web assets. Organizations from many vertical markets around the globe are benefiting from Reblaze's highly scalable WAF/IDS, DDoS, anti-scraping and Bot mitigation service.

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

eBay, AirAsia, Taboola, Reebonz, IAI, Payoneer, mySupermarket, William Hill, Fanduel

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Reblaze - part of Link11

January 2025

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. Reblaze - part of Link11

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Reblaze - part of Link11 and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.