F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) and F5 Silverline Managed Services are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.6, while F5 Silverline Managed Services is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) holds a 1.4% mindshare in DDOS, compared to F5 Silverline Managed Services’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of F5 Silverline Managed Services users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) and F5 Silverline Managed Services both compete in network security. While Silverline leverages cloud-based services, BIG-IP AFM focuses on on-premises solutions. Silverline appears to have an edge with its cloud-native functionality and real-time mitigation.

Features: F5 BIG-IP AFM offers load balancing, DDoS protection, and web application firewall capabilities. Its integration of network security activities and customization via iRules adds flexibility. F5 Silverline Managed Services provides real-time attack mitigation, distributed architecture benefits, and seamless cloud-native functionality, making it ideal for easy deployment and tailored protection.

Room for Improvement: F5 BIG-IP AFM could enhance user interface, automation, and reporting capabilities. Users also suggest improved API integration, simplified configuration, and better pricing. For Silverline, users request additional Points of Presence and better threat detection capabilities, alongside improved navigation and reduced costs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 BIG-IP AFM is typically used in on-premises and hybrid deployments, with mixed feedback on customer service response times. Silverline supports cloud and multi-cloud environments, offering flexible deployment. However, technical support can vary in quality, highlighting the need for consistent service across representatives.

Pricing and ROI: F5 BIG-IP AFM, though expensive, offers a comprehensive feature set that justifies its cost, with licensing options that may include additional support fees. Users report a good ROI, especially when integrated with other F5 products. Silverline's pricing, based on bandwidth usage, also poses a concern, with additional features potentially increasing costs. ROI is satisfactory when Silverline is used as part of a larger security ecosystem.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

March 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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.4%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is 1.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 1.3%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

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

Straightforward setup with very good granularity and performance

Our company uses the solution as a data center firewall. It is hard to determine all users within our infrastructure. It depends on systems we put behind the solution. Its internal but also a data center firewall. Sometimes, there are hooks from the solution to our external infrastructure or…

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DejanBlagojevic

Presales Engineer at Exclusive-networks

Mitigates more bot activity when defending web applications than any other vendor but comes at a price

F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it. We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.

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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

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"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."

"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."

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

More Cloudflare pros

"The protection is very useful."

"This product excells in every aspect from installation and the interface to providing superior network security."

"The customer service is excellent, and I rate it ten out of ten."

"The solution provides behavioral analysis via AI to detect malicious traffic."

"It blocks various attacks and mitigates disasters from occurring."

"CGNAT is one of its strong areas."

"The most valuable features of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) are the web gateway, load balancing, services, and applications available."

"The product’s most valuable features are LTM and WAF."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) pros

"The stability of the solution is very good."

"Its flexibility is the most valuable because it is a managed service. The good part is that you don't need to set it up. It just needs DNS routing, which is the easiest thing. Our client had Akamai for certain websites because they were using CDN features. They had NetScaler on the internal zone, F5 AWAFs on the data centers, and no WAF at all in the cloud. One of the main activities of the project was to move all these policies into a single WAF so that we could control and use that as a choke point. That exercise itself was very easy because it was a managed service and F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall does that for you. That's the best thing about F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall. It is easy to apply policies on-premises. If you have AWAF on-premises and you want to replicate some policies on F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, other than the policies that it applies by itself, it is easy because you have a team that supports it. F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works perfectly fine. It pretty much does everything that an Advanced WAF on-premises should do."

"F5 technical support is really good."

"The most valuable feature is flexibility."

"It's a good front end for public infrastructure"

"F5 Silverline offers load balancing, flexibility, and reliability."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

Cons

"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."

"DNS Management."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

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

"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 solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

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

More Cloudflare cons

"There should be simplified and better integration with BIG-IQ."

"Apart from the price, I feel no other areas need improvement."

"This would be absolutely the best network security solution if the price were not so high."

"The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP AFM in a complex environment was simple. However, the full deployment took us approximately one year."

"F5 BIG-IP AFM can improve the reporting interface in relation to advanced troubleshooting depending on CLI. They should have enhanced troubleshooting with the use of GUI."

"NGINX, which F5 purchased, has room for improvement in its features, particularly its load balancing or application load balancing features."

"F5 should increase its capability to prevent zero-day attacks."

"Deployment times vary according to the customer. It needs to be heavily configured. You need to look and you need to observe the behavior of the traffic before you can start configuring everything. It can take time."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) cons

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."

"You need to have Linux knowledge in order to use the shell."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market."

"There is a lot of room for improvement with their tech support. I am not sure F5 Silverline Managed Services can be classified as having tech support."

"In terms of the scalability, this part is always so confusing because they are checking for packet count. Also, after an attack, they said that the throughput must be from gigabits but then I check my bandwidth and it is already done in gigabits. So it is a little bit confusing."

"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better."

"The price is high in comparison to other products."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"A free version of the solution is available."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"We have purchased a five-year licensing package for the product."

"The solution is slightly on the higher priced side."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager is not an expensive solution."

"As per pricing, I would not say cheap, but little higher than cheap, but not very expensive. So you can say kind of value for money solutions."

"The price of F5 BIG-IP AFM is a little more expensive than other firewalls on the market."

"We need to pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution."

"F5 BIG-IP AFM is an affordable solution. There were not any additional fees other than the standard licensing."

"The product is expensive."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) pricing and cost advice

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

19%

Insurance Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Insurance Company

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

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 Firewall Manager?

CGNAT is one of its strong areas.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

If considering a one-stop solution that provides load balancing, DNS security, AAA authentication, and firewalling on...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

F5 should increase its capability to prevent zero-day attacks. Having advanced technology similar to other vendors li...

See all answers

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The initial setup is straightforward.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The solution is expensive, however, the quality and performance are good.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Arbor DDoS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 52% of the time

AWS Shield vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 16% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 15% of the time

A10 Thunder TPS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudflare One vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 9% of the time

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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 23% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

April 2025

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) report

Download F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services

April 2025

Download F5 Silverline Managed Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

F5 AFM, F5 Advanced Firewall Manager

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

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 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network. Built on F5’s industry-leading BIG-IP hardware and software platforms, BIG-IP AFM provides a scalable platform that delivers the flexible performance and control needed to mitigate aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and protocol attacks before they overwhelm and degrade applications and infrastructure availability.

For service providers, BIG-IP AFM IPS does even more, protecting the network edge and performing traffic inspection and protocol adherence for prevalent service provider protocols such as SS7, Diameter, HTTP/2, GTP, SCTP and SIP traffic coming into the network over UDP, TCP, and SCTP.

F5's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.

Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

March 2025

Free Report: F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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