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Fastly vs Symantec Web Application Firewall comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Fastly
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (17th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (7th)
Symantec Web Application Fi...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (44th)
 

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.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer1231533 - PeerSpot reviewer
An excellent up-to-date data repository handling external threats successfully
We have multiple applications that we wanted to ensure were protected and we chose Symantec for that. I'm the head of IT infrastructure and we are partners with Symantec.  Symantec has specifically helped connect external users to our internal network. It has also enabled us to ensure that those…

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 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."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"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."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"The setup was straightforward."
"The solution has an up-to-date data repository to deal with external threats."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"The pricing could be improved."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"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."
"Support is not that great."
"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."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"It would be an improvement if the management dashboards were not reliant upon Java."
"I'm not convinced that it's necessary the best solution going forward in the future."
"Sometimes scanning slows down the endpoints."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"We are using the free version."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"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 solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The price is reasonable."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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.
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...
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 ...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Symantec WAF, Blue Coat Protecting Web Applications
 

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.
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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.