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Fortinet FortiWeb vs R&S Web Application Firewall (DenyAll) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th)
R&S Web Application Firewal...
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.5
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (38th)
 

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.
SS
Geo-localization and IP reputation help to keep our clients secure and more available
The area that should be improved is licensing. When using an active/passive cluster, we have to pay 70% of the master appliance and license for the passive server that does not work. Since we know that only one server works at a time, we should pay only one license for the appliances and for the support as well. In my opinion, this has to be improved. If possible, the client software should be a web application instead of downloading software for the management. This can avoid login problems when they update or patch.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"This product is very user-friendly."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its security profile."
"I like FortiWeb's usability and ease of configuration. It's simple to configure rules and exceptions inside the attack log. We block everything by default. If something isn't working, we ask the system admin to adjust the template and add exceptions."
"Provides good vulnerability scanning, IPS, and geolocalization."
"Deployment can be straightforward"
"It is easy to install and to maintain."
"The three most valuable features that I noticed are the geo-localization of the user, the IP reputation, and the compartmental analysis."
 

Cons

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"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."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"In terms of performance, it needs to be more robust."
"New releases and old releases have some bugs, some features do not work as good as we want but every new release the Fortinet team fixes up problems."
"We use Kubernetes, so I would like to have a plugin to configure FortiWeb Cloud automatically using Kubernetes Ingress. That would reduce the complexity of setting up an Ingress object in Kubernetes. Some competing solutions help you configure Ingress and Kubernetes automatically."
"Integration and learning about attacks. I would improve these areas by making FortiWeb integrate with other network technologies and feedback from multiple platforms."
"Its threat intelligence capabilities may not be as advanced as some competitors."
"Lacks a VM demo to enable testing prior to purchase."
"The interface could have the interdependent elements arranged sequentially and wizards that go through most common deployment actions."
"FortiWeb needs to have support for the newest technology being used in web applications."
"The area that should be improved is licensing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"We are using the free version."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"FortiWeb can be purchased in VM mode for a lower price and the same features."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a ten out of ten."
"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."
"Due to the situation in Iran with the sanctions, the price of this solution is very expensive."
"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."
"Cheaper than others."
"It's an expensive solution, although there are no additional costs."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
41%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
5%
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?
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...
Which Web Application Firewall (WAF) would you recommend? R&S or Imperva?
Imperva is a strong choice, given their security focus and ongoing R&D into the product in areas such as bot mana...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Rohde & Schwarz Web Application Firewall, R&S WAF, DenyAll 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
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