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F5 Advanced WAF vs Sucuri 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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
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
69
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
Sucuri
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (22nd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (14th), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (12th)
 

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.
David Shlingbaum - PeerSpot reviewer
Simple solution and good WAF
Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section. Users get errors or EBAs, and if they want to read about it, they need to find it in the help section of the site. It would be more helpful to allow users to see more information and tips immediately from within the alert.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"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 Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"It is easy to obtain dashboard compliance because security policy views are included."
"F5 Advanced WAF is a comprehensive community platform with a strong commitment, making it valuable for businesses."
"The product has valuable features for load balancing, monitoring tools, and HPXpress services."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the easy identification of events and customization. We can pinpoint our settings."
"I like all of the features, but the main one is the attack signatures."
"The most valuable feature is artificial intelligence and to get extra internal access."
"The most valuable feature is that it is secure."
"WAF functionality is valuable for protecting applications from attacks."
"The most valuable part is the analytics and visualization."
"It significantly eases the workload and streamlines the initial setup required to protect a website."
"Domain name scanning since it allows us to scan all our domain names and determine whether it has malware or if is reported as phishing."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"The initial setup was straightforward. Straight forward because the plugin can simply be installed and then it does its job. It's not complex, there is no learning curve. The online scan is simple, you put in the website address and the scan gives us a report on the browser itself. It's simple to use."
"I use it as a WAF, which is basically a web firewall to monitor and block traffic to our web server."
 

Cons

"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."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"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."
"The user interface (UI) seems a bit outdated. Making it more user-friendly would be beneficial."
"I would not expect traffic details to pass through the web application firewall across the length of the whole application. I think that there is a web application where it can let the application function without traffic going in into the WAF."
"More legacy protocols should be added to the solution."
"The overall price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve."
"The solution is tedious. It takes a lot of discrete settings so one needs to get detailed and granular when they use the solution. It takes you a whole lot of energy and concentration to configure. It needs to be much more straight-forward, like other web solutions."
"The Sandbox integration feature could be improved."
"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."
"I would like to see a better interface and better documentation compatibility with other products. It's more complicated with OWASP."
"The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I would include more sites in the protection."
"I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that we have found sometimes customers or Google saying that there is something wrong with the website but Sucuri says that the site is clean so we do have to look at the site manually which means that the Sucuri scan does not pick up anything and everything."
"Confident score: Currently it does not have one and there are cases that most websites flagged are false-positives."
"Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section."
"In terms of improvement, the cost factor is always there."
"It would greatly benefit customers if they implemented an online chat or messaging system for quicker assistance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The price is reasonable."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"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."
"The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is comparable to a Rolls-Royce. Its price is a bit high when you compare it with other vendors. F5 Advanced WAF is a bit expensive. The customer was on a three-year plan and it was around $560,000."
"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."
"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."
"I think the price is very high."
"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."
"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"
"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."
"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."
"The ROI has been very good. Because of the solution, I have a tax break. The site developers were not always experienced people. We used to pay more for cleaning up the site when it was infected. Now, we have peace of mind knowing that the solution will clean up the site and that we won't have to go through the unnecessary process of restoring it from a backup. The protection on the WAF and the measures for backups have also prevented our site from going down."
"Sucuri offers different plans, both the standard plan and an advanced plan. So there are different plans to choose from."
"I’d simply say it’s really worth it."
"It stands out as a more cost-effective option compared to other cloud-based security services like Cloudflare or JetPass."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
18%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Educational Organization
42%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 Sucuri?
The initial setup was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sucuri?
The pricing is very reasonable. Sucuri offer other features as an add-on, such as backup, but these have an additiona...
What needs improvement with Sucuri?
The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I woul...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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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
The Loft Salon, Tom McFarlin, WPBeginner, Taylor Town, Everything Everywhere, Financial Ducks in a Row, Chubstr, Real Advice Gal, Sujan Patel, Wallao, List25, School the World
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Sucuri and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.