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NGINX App Protect vs Wallarm NG WAF 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
7.2
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)
NGINX App Protect
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (15th), Container Security (18th), API Security (2nd)
Wallarm NG WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (36th), API Security (12th)
 

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.
Saurav Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers protection to users from external threats
NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
it_user666765 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deployment is simple. Machine learning techniques lower the false-positives alerts rate.
The use of a WAF becomes especially relevant in the case of concrete vulnerabilities, such as those uncovered via penetration tests or source code reviews. Even if it were possible to fix the vulnerability in the application promptly and with a reasonable amount of effort, the modified version can generally only be deployed at the next maintenance interval; often 2-4 weeks later (a patch dilemma). For a WAF with whitelisting, vulnerabilities can be fixed promptly (hotfix) so that they cannot be exploited before the next scheduled maintenance. WAFs are especially fast in this aspect, meaning they can collaborate with source code analysis tools, so that detected external vulnerabilities can automatically result in a recommended rule set for the WAF. A WAF is particularly important in securing productive web applications which themselves in turn consist of multiple components and which cannot be quickly changed by the operator; e.g., in the case of poorly documented applications or regarding third-party products without sufficient maintenance cycles. A WAF is the only option for promptly closing external vulnerabilities.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"The UI is good."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"The stability of the product is very impressive since it handles 60,000 to 70,000 requests or transactions per second."
"WAF is useful to track mitigation, inclusion, prevention, and the parametric firewall."
"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."
"It has the best documentation features."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its open source."
"I would say that the most valuable feature is the ability to operate in a DevOps environment and to be configured through API and pipeline by the developers themselves."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the OWASP certification. Additionally, the tool's ability to enforce strong passwords and OTP within minutes is impressive. With its analytics and recommendations, it is a very good solution."
"Helps us to monitor situation in regards to attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them."
 

Cons

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"Technical support is lacking."
"Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks."
"The integration of NGINX App Protect could improve."
"Its technical support could be better."
"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."
"Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time."
"They could provide a better user interface."
"The configuration needs to be more flexible because it is difficult to do things that are outside of the ordinary."
"As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment."
"The biggest problem for us was the stability and speed using the first version of Wallarm. Now, it is fine."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"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."
"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 product's pricing is cheap."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."
"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."
"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."
"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."
"There are no additional fees."
"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."
"​Pricing must be cheaper than the competition and the licensing must be good.​"
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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%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Real Estate/Law Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?
I don't know the pricing yet because in my other project, I was not part of the buying side and I was just starting t...
What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?
It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requir...
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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall
Wallarm NG-WAF
 

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.
Information Not Available
Panasonic. Miro. Rappi. Wargaming. Gannett. Omio. Acronis. Workforce Software. Tipalti. SEMRush.
Find out what your peers are saying about NGINX App Protect vs. Wallarm NG WAF and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.