F5 Advanced WAF vs Wallarm NG WAF comparison

F5 and Wallarm are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6, while Wallarm is ranked #36. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Wallarm users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Wallarm NG WAF and F5 Advanced WAF are competing in the web application firewall market. While Wallarm excels in affordability and support, F5 stands out for its complex features and advanced security capabilities.

Features: Wallarm NG WAF focuses on robust threat detection, adaptive security capabilities, and ease of integration. F5 Advanced WAF offers extensive features like bot protection, advanced application security, and behavioral analytics for enhanced security for organizations requiring intricate controls.

Room for Improvement: Wallarm can improve by expanding its feature set and offering more advanced customization. Additionally, it could benefit from better threat intelligence integration. F5 Advanced WAF could improve its user-friendliness and streamline its deployment process. The cost can also be a barrier for some potential users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Wallarm NG WAF provides easy deployment and seamless integration, making it appealing for companies looking for simplicity, coupled with reliable customer support. F5 Advanced WAF offers extensive support options but might have a steeper learning curve due to its complex features, although this is mitigated by their comprehensive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Wallarm NG WAF is notable for its cost-effective pricing and solid return on investment, ideal for businesses managing tight budgets. F5 Advanced WAF demands a higher setup cost but justifies the expense with advanced features that offer substantial ROI for businesses needing higher security levels.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Wallarm NG WAF Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Wallarm NG WAF

April 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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it_user666765

Head of Application Security at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Deployment is simple. Machine learning techniques lower the false-positives alerts rate.

The use of a WAF becomes especially relevant in the case of concrete vulnerabilities, such as those uncovered via penetration tests or source code reviews. Even if it were possible to fix the vulnerability in the application promptly and with a reasonable amount of effort, the modified version can generally only be deployed at the next maintenance interval; often 2-4 weeks later (a patch dilemma). For a WAF with whitelisting, vulnerabilities can be fixed promptly (hotfix) so that they cannot be exploited before the next scheduled maintenance. WAFs are especially fast in this aspect, meaning they can collaborate with source code analysis tools, so that detected external vulnerabilities can automatically result in a recommended rule set for the WAF. A WAF is particularly important in securing productive web applications which themselves in turn consist of multiple components and which cannot be quickly changed by the operator; e.g., in the case of poorly documented applications or regarding third-party products without sufficient maintenance cycles. A WAF is the only option for promptly closing external vulnerabilities.

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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

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

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

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"The tool is user-friendly."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

More Cloudflare pros

"The valuable features vary from customers to customers. Some customers are okay with the basic features of the WAF, and some customers use advanced WAF with a few other features."

"The best solution for WAF."

"There is no need to worry about updating signatures because WAF will automatically update the signatures for you."

"F5 Advanced WAF is a stable solution, we are satisfied. It is more stable than ForiWeb."

"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 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 this solution are the WAF protection, Data Safe, and the seven-layer DDoS."

"The AOF solution provides numerous security features."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"Helps us to monitor situation in regards to attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them."

Cons

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"Support response time could be improved."

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."

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

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

More Cloudflare cons

"F5 needs to improve API protection with a single F5 solution, without requiring additional modules."

"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."

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

"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."

"We usually use a third-party tool for logging and reporting. It would be nice if we could do that right on this solution. They have one, but it's not very stable. Logging and reporting effectively would be a big enhancement."

"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."

"They should work on the virtualization of NGINX."

"One area for improvement in the product is its SSO integration, which posed challenges and required significant effort to resolve."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"The biggest problem for us was the stability and speed using the first version of Wallarm. Now, it is fine."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

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

"The price is reasonable."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"We are using the free version."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."

"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."

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

"After buying the program, you just pay for the support every year."

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

"The pricing is too high."

"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."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"Pricing must be cheaper than the competition and the licensing must be good."

See which vendors are best for you

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

18%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

21%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

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...

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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...

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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?

Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost, leading to amb...

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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...

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Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 31% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

April 2025

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

Download Wallarm NG WAF product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Wallarm NG-WAF

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.

Wallarm NG WAF is utilized to protect against web application threats, enhance security policies, and ensure consistent application security. It provides real-time attack prevention, detailed threat analytics, and automated incident response, making it suitable for both small and large-scale environments.

Wallarm NG WAF offers comprehensive API protection and adaptive security measures integrated with DevOps workflows. It efficiently detects and blocks attacks using AI-driven detection algorithms and provides thorough coverage against OWASP Top 10 threats. Users benefit from its easy deployment, scalability, and user-friendly configuration. Detailed analytics and robust performance in diverse environments make it a reliable option. However, users suggest improvements in documentation, customer support, update frequency, initial configuration process, and better integration capabilities to enhance the overall experience.

What are the key features of Wallarm NG WAF?

Real-time attack prevention: Offers immediate protection against web application threats.
AI-driven detection algorithms: Efficiently identifies and blocks malicious activities.
DevOps integration: Seamlessly integrates with DevOps tools and workflows.
OWASP Top 10 coverage: Provides comprehensive protection against top security risks.
Detailed analytics: Delivers in-depth threat analysis for better security management.
Scalability: Suitable for both small and large-scale environments.
Easy deployment: Quick and simple setup process for immediate use.

What benefits should you look for in Wallarm NG WAF reviews?

Enhanced security policies: Strengthens overall application security.
Consistent application security: Ensures uniform protection across all applications.
Automated incident response: Reduces manual intervention during security events.
Comprehensive API protection: Safeguards all API interactions effectively.
Adaptive security measures: Adjusts defenses based on emerging threats.
User-friendly configuration: Simplifies initial setup and ongoing management.
Robust performance: Maintains high security standards in various environments.

Wallarm NG WAF is implemented across different industries, including finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. It addresses their unique security needs by providing adaptive protections, detailed threat analytics, and integration capabilities. The scalability and ease of deployment make it an ideal choice for organizations managing large-scale applications and APIs.

Wallarm

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

Panasonic. Miro. Rappi. Wargaming. Gannett. Omio. Acronis. Workforce Software. Tipalti. SEMRush.

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Wallarm NG WAF

April 2025

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. Wallarm NG WAF

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Wallarm NG WAF and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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