Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Silverline Managed Services
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (26th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (19th)
NSFOCUS Web Application Fir...
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (46th)
 

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.
DejanBlagojevic - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
it_user933945 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers Application Protection Against Web Attacks
There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"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."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is it becomes similar to a distributed architecture."
"It's a good front end for public infrastructure"
"The product’s UI is easy to understand."
"The most valuable features are the configuration and configuring the process."
"The most important feature is that they have seven firewall protection, to protect our web servers."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"We have a lot of businesses that we put behind this solution, and it has really helped us in terms of monitoring the logs and incidents."
"Since we are using this tool for protection purposes we really appreciate the hybrid security abilities; the main idea here is that we powerful protection our application needs."
 

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."
"DNS Management."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"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."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."
"The navigation is difficult to use."
"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."
"We need to have support for cloud protection, which is not offered by this solution."
"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."
"The price is high in comparison to other products."
"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."
"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."
"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"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 price is reasonable."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"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."
"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 price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."
"The product’s pricing is reasonable."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Insurance Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
No data available
 

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.
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection
NSFOCUS WAF, NSFOCUS Web Application Security
 

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.
City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office
2016 G20 Summit
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5, Microsoft and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.