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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

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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)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (26th)
 

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.
Shehzad Ali - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers time and cost savings with integration, but user interface needs improvement
We are using it for our internal application development. We are testing those features of application gateways. We are integrating it with our solutions, application, Azure Application Gateway Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well. It provides a range of services, so it…
Archana Heeralal - PeerSpot reviewer
A good solution to implement web application firewall for applications
There are some lags in Signal Sciences for the web application firewalls. Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic. There is a little bit of complexity with custom rules that should be removed. Signal Sciences should add a feature called rate limiting with multiple options, wherein I can create a rate limiting based on the cookie request or the IP.

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 is its usability."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"It's very user-friendly."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The UI is good."
"In my experience, Microsoft products have a smooth integration and facilitate easy management and monitoring. Using Azure Application Gateway allows us to efficiently handle the system loads."
"The production is a valuable feature."
"Good customization; able to report and take action on alerts."
"The solution provides great automation and it is easy to upgrade service."
"The solution's most valuable feature is an HTTP solution and SSL certificate. It is also easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the web application firewall (WAF)."
"The health probe is pretty good for your backend health. It tells you whether it's communicating and talking to the endpoint correctly. It is quite useful."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway are the policies, the data store they are using, and the cloud platform it operates on."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
 

Cons

"Latencies are always a problem."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Support response time could be improved."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"The user interface could be better."
"One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS."
"I want the solution's support to improve. The tool is also expensive."
"The configuration is very specific right now and needs to be much more flexible."
"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."
"Customer service can be improved. There is room for improvement, specifically in paid support, by providing more direct contact."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"Scalability can be an issue."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The price is reasonable."
"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."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"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."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"There is a need to pay a fixed price per month to use the product. There are no additional payments to be made to Microsoft apart from the charges paid towards the monthly licensing costs attached to the solution."
"It is not expensive."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has less price than other application gateway solutions."
"The solution is fairly priced."
"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."
"Every solution comes with a license and cost. Microsoft provides the license and the total cost is for the maintenance every year."
"The price of the solution can be reduced a bit."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

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'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...
What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

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.
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.