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Fortinet FortiWeb vs NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

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
6.5
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th)
NSFOCUS Web Application Fir...
Average Rating
7.0
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.
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.
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

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"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."
"The GUI is user-friendly."
"Auto Learn feature: Makes policy additions or deletions for my customers very simple​"
"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."
"If I need something from tech support, I can get it answered within the hour."
"FortiWeb provides the level of security we need at an excellent price point. It's easy to deploy and operationally efficient."
"The solution is easy to configure and deploy."
"It is a stable product."
"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

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"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."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"DNS Management."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"The initial setup in our data center was somewhat complex."
"A better load balancer is needed when multiple servers are used for the same website."
"Fortinet FortiWeb could improve data integration."
"The automation piece can be improved. Although they say it can be automated very well, there is still manual work. Its usability should be improved in terms of automation because we want to build an infrastructure with code, but you can't do that easily with this solution. If they can give us APIs in the firewalls that we can tap into, it would be perfect."
"For advanced users, it would be really useful to have access and the ability to manipulate packets. If we can access and manipulate the contents of packets, even encrypted packets... that would be powerful. Since we're looking at packets arriving at our network, we would have the private key to access those packets and their information."
"In my experience, Fortinet FortiWeb could improve the intelligent features to acknowledge whether any threat or incident that's running happened. Then give us the ability to escalate it to layer 2 or layer 3 in the network operations."
"If the price was lower, it would be a bit more attractive, as an option, to the customers."
"Fortinet FortiWeb is not scalable. You'll need more budget to change the hardware."
"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

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"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."
"There are no licensing costs."
"Cheaper than others."
"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."
"The solution is cheaper compared with other solutions. It has a yearly license."
"FortiWeb is more expensive than some competing products."
"FortiWeb offers these services at a price that SME customers can afford, but it's also suitable for large enterprises. Still, they need to put in more work to gain a greater share of enterprise business because they face stiff competition in this segment from F5, Cloudflare, and some others."
"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
43%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
4%
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 Fortinet FortiWeb?
The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?
The pricing of Fortinet FortiWeb is affordable and competitive.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
I see no room for improvement at the moment.
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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
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.
Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
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: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.