Fortinet FortiWeb vs NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall comparison

Fortinet and NSFOCUS are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Fortinet is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1, while NSFOCUS is ranked #43. Fortinet holds a 7.5% mindshare in WAF, compared to NSFOCUS’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Fortinet users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NSFOCUS users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiWeb and NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF).

To learn more, read our detailed Web Application Firewall (WAF) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2026

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Helped 885,311 peers since 2012

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 Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiWeb is 7.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiWeb	7.5%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.4%
NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall	0.5%
Other	86.6%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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HameedAhmed

Joint Director at PAA

Security threats have been reduced through seamless deployment and strong integration with other tools

I have used Fortinet FortiWeb's integration features. We have easily integrated all of the applications with the product. Most of the applications we are using are in-house built. My technical team is looking after the best features. I have not used it extensively for maybe two and a half years. I have been involved in the installation, but I am not actually using the product. I work with it from time to time but not extensively. I would assess Fortinet FortiWeb's adaptive machine learning and artificial intelligence as having new patches installed regarding artificial intelligence, but when we bought it, I think the learning feature was there. Now they have installed artificial intelligence features through patches. We have a complete portfolio of Fortinet in our organization, including FortiMail, Fortinet FortiWeb, and FortiGate, along with multi-factor authentication. All of the products are from Fortinet. Fortinet tools integrate with each other and work in conjunction. I think Fortinet FortiWeb has helped us meet regulatory compliance because we are not a regulatory organization, but our sister organization is regulatory. We have regulatory compliance with the International Civil Aviation Authority, whose audit teams have checked our data center and these security products, and they are satisfied with us. The question about leveraging Fortinet FortiWeb's automated policy management does not pertain to my domain because I am not so technical, but I am in a management role now. My engineer is more technical than me. I would rate this product an eight point five out of ten.

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it_user933945

Desktop Engineer at eros international media ltd

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.

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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

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."

"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."

"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."

"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is Fail-Open."

"The most important feature of this solution is protection from attack."

"Auto Learn feature: Makes policy additions or deletions for my customers very simple"

"It makes our web site system work nice and smooth."

"SSL Offloading simplifies the public certificate handling and brings additional protection features."

"One main feature we are very happy about is file security and upload functionality."

"Fortinet FortiWeb uses smaller boxes while meeting the same technical specifications, which automatically makes it cheaper than F5."

"One of the big advantages of using Fortinet FortiWeb is all the Fortinet family solutions use the same user interface and logic. This makes it easy to use, configure, manage, and understand if you have used one of their solutions before or are wanting to implement other Fortinet solutions in the future. Additionally, all Fortinet solutions can be managed with one application called FortiManager."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pros

"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."

"We really appreciate the hybrid security abilities; we get powerful protection for our application needs."

Cons

"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."

"Its stability could be better."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

"Cloudflare should update the version of the ModSecurity core rule set that they run on."

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"Support can be challenging at times."

"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"A user interface or dashboard for troubleshooting is needed."

"The improvement needed is in their response time. Now it takes longer, and they talk about SLA and 48-hour response times."

"Fortinet can improve their technical support, especially the response time."

"I had some small problems when I was upgrading firmware. After the upgrade, some of my certificates were deleted."

"It would be good if the solution integrated with other solutions, like SAP."

"When there is downtime at their data center, it becomes a transit point issue for us, causing downtime in our environment as well."

"The GUI is not as nice as CheckPoint or Palo Alto."

"I would like to see the Application Delivery Control (ADC) and Web Application Firewall (WAF) combined in one device."

More Fortinet FortiWeb cons

"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."

"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"The solution is expensive."

"It is not too pricey."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"It really pays off to buy licences for multiple years."

"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a ten out of ten."

"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 license to use Fortinet FortiWeb is approximately $14,000."

"When I use any other firewall, I have to take a license. It could be a perpetual license or subscription-based. In both cases, we have to pay some amount in advance, whereas in the case of FortiWeb, when using it as a service, I am paying half a dollar only for the domain name, and then I am paying based on the traffic or the number of requests."

"The licensing cost of the product is pretty high compared to other OEMs in the market."

"The cost isn't expensive."

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

More Fortinet FortiWeb pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	60
Midsize Enterprise	27
Large Enterprise	36

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

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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?

The pricing for Fortinet FortiWeb varies with different models having different prices. It depends on the requirement...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?

There is room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb. The team was only from FortiGate itself. They are making new firm...

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Compared 28% of the time

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Compared 23% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiWeb

March 2026

Download Fortinet FortiWeb product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2026

Download NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)

NSFOCUS WAF, NSFOCUS Web Application Security

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

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

NSFOCUS understands how critical your web servers and applications are to your business and we have designed a closed-loop web application security solution to protect you from web attacks, data breaches and downtime. This solution includes website protection through our Web Application Firewall (WAF) and pro-active vulnerability assessment using our Web Vulnerability Scanning System (WVSS).

NSFOCUS

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

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

2016 G20 Summit

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2026

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