F5 Silverline Managed Services vs NGINX App Protect comparison

F5 Silverline Managed Services and NGINX App Protect are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 Silverline Managed Services is ranked #27 with an average rating of 7.3, while NGINX App Protect is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.8. Additionally, 100% of F5 Silverline Managed Services users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of NGINX App Protect users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

NGINX App Protect and F5 Silverline Managed Services compete in the web application firewall (WAF) category. F5 Silverline Managed Services appears to have an edge due to its comprehensive managed services and 24/7 attack mitigation capabilities.

Features: NGINX App Protect offers a range of features including load balancing, security headers, and a command-line interface allowing extensive control over HTTP sessions. Meanwhile, F5 Silverline Managed Services excels with cloud-native functionalities, managed WAF capabilities, and real-time attack mitigation, ensuring a high level of protection.

Room for Improvement: NGINX App Protect could benefit from better profiling and automation, enhanced high-throughput handling, and improved bot protection. Additionally, the presence of a complex licensing model and the absence of WebSocket inspection have been noted. F5 Silverline Managed Services could improve by increasing its Points of Presence (PoPs), reducing high costs, and providing better navigation and automation features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NGINX App Protect allows flexible deployment across various environments, though customer support experiences are mixed. F5 Silverline Managed Services supports multiple deployment models and offers managed services, with customer support generally considered knowledgeable despite needing some improvements.

Pricing and ROI: NGINX App Protect is perceived as expensive but offers a reasonable pricing model with solid ROI, particularly when integrated with CICD features. F5 Silverline Managed Services is also costly, with noted lack of pricing flexibility, but its comprehensive features often justify the cost in large-scale deployments, ensuring a notable return on investment.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. NGINX App Protect Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. NGINX App Protect

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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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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Saurav Kumar

Senior security architecture at National Payment Corporation Of India

Offers protection to users from external threats

NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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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 features of the solution are performance and security."

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

"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."

"Cloudflare has many features."

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

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

More Cloudflare pros

"F5 technical support is really good."

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

"Most vendors fulfill the requirements for standard DDoS protection, but F5 Silverline Managed Services has a better understanding of defending web applications like HTTP and can mitigate more bot activity than any other vendor."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is flexibility."

"The most important feature is that they have seven firewall protection, to protect our web servers."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The stability of the solution is very good."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

"The stability of the product is very impressive since it handles 60,000 to 70,000 requests or transactions per second."

"I tested specific features and evaluated the solution against the Web Application Firewall. I conducted research to test different detection percentages. I did not use it directly for protection but for evaluation purposes."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its open source."

"The most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found."

"NGINX App Protect's best features are auto-learning, which creates a profile of applications that are deployed, bot protection, and force protection, which lets you configure your brute force policy and alert for and prevent brute force attacks."

"The most valuable feature is that I can establish different services from the firewall."

"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working."

"It is a very good tool for load balancing."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

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

"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."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."

"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."

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

More Cloudflare cons

"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."

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

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

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

"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."

"I just hope the price can be cheaper."

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

"The navigation is difficult to use."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

"It doesn't have more advanced features like no false-positive security, which you can configure in Advanced WAF."

"The integration of NGINX App Protect could improve."

"The product's user interface is an area with shortcomings as it can be quite confusing for users, making it an area where improvements are required."

"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."

"Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks."

"Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time."

"It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput."

"As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment."

More NGINX App Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

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

"We are using the free version."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"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."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"A free version of the solution is available."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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 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."

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

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

"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."

"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."

"NGINX App Protect is expensive."

"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."

"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."

"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

21%

Insurance Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

Healthcare Company

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

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 product’s pricing is reasonable.

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX App Protect?

It's very easy to deploy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?

The product's price is high.

See all answers

What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 19% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 12% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 9% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 23% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 17% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 10% of the time

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 9% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

February 2025

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

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'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.

NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
Complying with security and regulatory requirements

NGINX App Protect offers:

Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. NGINX App Protect

January 2025

Free Report: F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. NGINX App Protect

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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