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Fortinet FortiWeb vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway 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
7.1
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)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
 

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.
Kacem CHAMMALI - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Sooryanarayan Hegde - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy management and configuration, affordable, and has good features
We use all the features. It is very useful. Using WAF, we can control the WAF rules based on our application requirements. We can control what rules should be used and what should be disabled. The role of the tool is limited to HTTP traffic. It does exactly what it must do. It's a regional service. We know how to use it for DR scenarios. WAF has been the most valuable in protecting applications. We use at least three instances in the back end to give the best performance for our applications. The management and configuration of the solution is quite easy. All certificate renewals are automatically taken care of by Key Vault.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"It's very user-friendly."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"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 DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"The UI is good."
"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."
"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."
"It's the extra security that is the most valuable feature. You have insight into your traffic. There are some great insights into what utilities hackers are trying to exploit. It blocks a lot of stuff from the internet."
"Other than the additional security with exploit protection, we have simpler certificate handling, as we can keep internal servers using internal certificates continuously distributed and updated by Active Directory Group Policy, while the public certificates become updated only in a single place, FortiWeb itself."
"The GUI is user-friendly and it's easy to understand how to manage it."
"If I need something from tech support, I can get it answered within the hour."
"L-7 protection makes possible to protect legacy/not up-to-date servers/applications without changing the application code."
"When it comes to blocking unknown threats and attacks, I would give it the highest score possible. We first started using AWS and its Web Application Firewalls. That was okay, but it was quite a manual process to keep it up to date, whereas Fortinet is always up to date, and the default rules or the modules that you can turn on are very easy to use."
"Provides good vulnerability scanning, IPS, and geolocalization."
"It is a scalable solution...The installation phase of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is very easy."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is an easy-to-use solution."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"The most valuable feature is WAF."
"I like the tool's stability and performance."
"I find Application Gateway’s WAF module valuable because it helps prevent layer 7 attacks."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway gives us a lot of benefits, including domain mapping."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is traffic management."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"Fortinet WAF came out recently, and there is not much feedback about customer experience. For each project, customers ask about the scenarios and references of the customers who have implemented this solution, which we don't have. They need to simplify the customer experience and provide more information so that we can propose Fortinet Fortiweb as a WAF solution to customers and convince them. They need to improve their service and training. We need good training to implement and use it properly and know more about it. We still don't know much about Fortinet WAF. We didn't get any proper training sessions. Other vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto, Check Point, and Barracuda provide such sessions. Whenever we receive a request from a customer for this solution, we just give the price. We don't propose this solution because we don't know much about it. We propose whatever we are familiar with and what is supported."
"Integration and learning about attacks. I would improve these areas by making FortiWeb integrate with other network technologies and feedback from multiple platforms."
"FortiWeb does not exist in a cloud-based form. Its only available for deployment as a virtual appliance on AWS and Azure IaaS platforms. Because of the trend to WAF environments, it would be good to have it as a SaaS. Also, FortiWeb would be more competitive if it combined WAF and DDoS protection."
"The reporting could be optimized."
"The solution could have more customization."
"The solution is rather complicated. If you know what to do, it's not bad, but it's complicated for a first time user to configure the solution. What I'd like to improve are the custom signatures."
"HA Architecture needs improvement. I would improve it by working on AP HA."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The solution should provide more security for certificate-based services so that we can implement more security on that."
"The solution needs improvements in integrating different services and creating a better application balance."
"Microsoft needs to work on their documentation."
"The product's performance should be better."
"Application Gateway’s limitation is that the private and the public endpoint cannot use the same port."
"For the first-time user, it is difficult to understand so the user-interface needs to be improved."
"It could be easier to change servicing."
"The solution could improve by increasing the performance when doing updates. For example, if I change the certificate it can take 30 minutes. Other vendors do not have this type of problem."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"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."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool an eight."
"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb depends from customer to customer because some customers are considering using other solutions, such as Imperva. The price of Fortinet FortiWeb sits well for the middle-sized customers that we deal with."
"So far, I have been pretty pleased with the way it's priced and licensed. The way it's done makes it easy, especially for an organization like us, so I've been pleased with the way it's priced and licensed right now."
"There's only one payment for the duration of the license. On a scale from one to five, I would rate pricing at four. I have not encountered any additional costs on my projects involving Fortinet FortiWeb."
"Due to the situation in Iran with the sanctions, the price of this solution is very expensive."
"It is fine now. We had to earlier negotiate the price."
"FortiWeb is more expensive than some competing products."
"If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the product price as three or four."
"I would rate the pricing a three out of ten, with ten being cheap and one being expensive."
"The pricing is based on how much you use the solution."
"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."
"The solution is paid monthly. The solution is highly expensive."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."
"It is an expensive solution. We have an enterprise agreement, it is monthly."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"It is not expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
43%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
4%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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...
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 Fortinet FortiWeb?
The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.
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...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
There is room for improvement in the portability on multi-cloud environments. Enhanced DDoS integration to make Forti...
What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
 

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.
Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiWeb vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.