Fastly vs Fortinet FortiWeb comparison

Fastly and Fortinet are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Fastly is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.5, while Fortinet is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.8. Additionally, 100% of Fastly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and Fortinet FortiWeb are both competitors in the web application security and performance optimization market. Fastly has an advantage in speed and simplicity, excelling in dynamic content delivery, while Fortinet FortiWeb is superior in comprehensive security capabilities, making it ideal for complex security requirements.

Features: Fastly provides a real-time CDN and edge cloud platform, allowing instant purging, origin shielding, and VCL configuration. Fortinet FortiWeb offers advanced threat protection, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and detailed analytics for attack prevention.

Room for Improvement: Fastly can enhance its focus on security to provide more comprehensive protection features similar to FortiWeb's offerings, which may include advanced threat detection and machine learning integrations. Fortinet FortiWeb can improve by simplifying its configuration and deployment processes and focusing on enhancing content delivery efficiency to match Fastly's speed.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly offers straightforward deployment and responsive customer support, ideal for businesses seeking quick setup. In contrast, Fortinet FortiWeb entails a more involved setup due to its advanced security features, but it offers extensive documentation and in-depth customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly's on-demand pricing model is cost-efficient for businesses prioritizing agility and speed, offering quicker ROI. Fortinet FortiWeb, with its higher initial setup cost, provides long-term ROI through security breach prevention, making it a valuable investment for security-focused enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

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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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

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Kacem CHAMMALI

IT Infrastructures Administrator at Esprit

Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb

The xFF, or X-Forwarded-For feature, IP reputation, and protected hostname. We can block access using the IP address, so no one can connect to our web server or website using the real IP. They need to use the FQDN instead. Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb and the option to protect the hostname. All traffic passes through FortiWeb. Machine learning capabilities in FortiWeb: I don't use machine learning all the time. In the initial phase of FortiWeb deployment, we use the learning process to detect the traffic passing through FortiGate to our website.

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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

"Cloudflare has many features."

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

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cloudflare pros

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"FortiWeb's ease of deployment is what we liked the most about it. Implementing FortiWeb was extremely fast and easy, which was a significant advantage. It comes with several preconfigured rule sets and templates."

"Technical support is very good."

"The most valuable feature in this solution is the ability to disseminate between the user entering some wrong value to the field, and a suspicious actor trying to exploit some known vulnerability."

"Fortinet is a great SD-WAN player when it comes to security capabilities."

"FortiWeb offers a good price for the marketplace. In the Sri Lankan market, it's hard to find high-end products that can match FortiWeb's pricing. For high-end solutions, the price is always extremely high."

"L-7 protection makes possible to protect legacy/not up-to-date servers/applications without changing the application code."

"The support services, performance, and pricing are all valuable features. The performance is excellent."

"We find that it is quite stable and reliable."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pros

Cons

"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."

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"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."

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"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."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"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."

"Latencies are always a problem."

More Cloudflare cons

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"Support is not that great."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"There is room for improvement in the portability on multi-cloud environments."

"Its threat intelligence capabilities may not be as advanced as some competitors."

"The upgrade process could be a bit smoother."

"A better load balancer is needed when multiple servers are used for the same website."

"The initial setup process could be improved."

"The tool's WAF or web application firewall area has certain aspects that can be improved."

"The initial setup in our data center was somewhat complex."

"The solution could offer more integration opportunities."

More Fortinet FortiWeb cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"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."

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

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

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

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

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"It is an expensive solution."

"If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the product price as three or four."

"The maintenance fee for this product could be improved."

"All our Fortinet pricing is bundled together for different products, like FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiWeb. FortiWeb, by itself, is probably around $2,500 to $3,500."

"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."

"Due to the situation in Iran with the sanctions, the price of this solution is very expensive."

"Its subscription prices are cheaper, and it is not very expensive. From a price perspective, Fortinet is a very well-known security vendor. Subscriptions are very simple. They have a couple of licenses on an appliance, and that's it. The cost is not that big. One license is 40K, which they give with all the products. Another one includes the subscriptions for threat prevention, IPS, sandboxing, etc, which is more than enough."

"It keeps changing, but it's based on the size of the VM you buy and also the traffic throughput you want from it, whereas what we have on Azure is just the traffic throughput. You can also pay on a monthly basis from Azure. During each part of the project, it's okay to get Azure-based licensing or AWS-based licensing for FortiWeb, but over time, you would want to go with the perpetual license. You should go to Fortinet and buy the license from them. So, there is a two-step process there."

"The pricing is pretty good. We do pass a lot of traffic through our API servers. Something like 100 gigs of web traffic is a fair amount for reduced JSON API calls, but the cost is $50. For that peace of mind, we have thousands and thousands of customers that are protected by that $50, so it's a no-brainer."

More Fortinet FortiWeb 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

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

43%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

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 Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?

The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?

I would rate the licensing cost as seven out of ten, considering it good value for money. The price is affordable and...

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What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?

There is room for improvement in the portability on multi-cloud environments. Enhanced DDoS integration to make Forti...

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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Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 17% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Edgio vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 22% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 16% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 9% of the time

AWS WAF vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiManager vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Fastly

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiWeb

February 2025

Download Fortinet FortiWeb product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

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

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

Fortinet FortiWeb is a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that protects your web applications and APIs from attacks targeting known as well as unknown vulnerabilities. As the surface of your web applications evolves with each change of existing features and deployment of new features, your APIs are left exposed. Fortinet FortiWeb provides the board protection capabilities required to protect web applications without sacrificing performance or manageability.

Fortinet FortiWeb is an automatic, advanced multi-layer solution that provides secure protection by discerning irregular behavior and distinguishing between malicious and benign anomalies. In addition, the approach delivers powerful bot mitigation capacities which authorize harmless bots to connect while blocking malicious bot activity securely. Regardless of where an application is hosted, Fortinet FortiWeb will safeguard business applications by providing deployment options, such as virtual machines, hardware appliances, and containers that can be deployed in the data center, cloud environments, or in the cloud-native SaaS solution.

Fortinet FortiWeb Features and Benefits

APIs and web applications have become integral to the rising demand for business-critical applications. Now more than ever, businesses are in need of an automatic firewall that will provide them with security, without sacrificing performance or reliability. Fortinet FortiWeb offers a variety of features and benefits, including:

Security fabric integration: FortiWeb integrates with other Fortinet solutions to provide advanced protection from persistent threats.
Proven web application and API protection: FortiWeb safeguards applications from all DDOS attacks, malicious bot attacks, and OWASP Top-10 threats.
Advanced visual analytics: FortiWeb offers a unique visual reporting tool that other WAF solutions don’t by providing a detailed analysis of attack elements and sources.
Hardware-based acceleration: With fast and secure traffic encryption and decryption, FortiWeb provides best-in-class WAF protection.
ML-based threat detection: FortiWeb delivers multi-layer machine learning defense protection to defend against zero-day attacks and reduce false positives.
False positive mitigation tools: Reduce daily management of policies through advanced tools to guarantee only unwanted traffic is blocked.

Reviews from Real Users

Fortinet FortiWeb offers an industry-leading Web Application Firewall, and users are satisfied with it for a number of reasons, including the ability to control everything from the dashboard and the PCI-compliant reports it offers.

Carlos P., director of business and digital transformation at SERNIVEL3, notes, "You have the ability to control everything from one single dashboard."

A director at a tech service company, says, "Banks have to be compliant with PCI and other things, and FortiWeb is absolutely amazing in terms of providing these reports. Otherwise, they will have to spend a lot of time on them."

Fortinet

Sample Customers

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

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

January 2025

Free Report: Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.