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Radware Alteon vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) 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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
Radware Alteon
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (5th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (10th)
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) (28th)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Vivek Nadiminti - PeerSpot reviewer
The integrated application protection has helped secure our critical web applications
Valuable features of Radware Alteon include global server load balancing, SSL offloading, Layer 7 load balancing, automation and traffic scaling, real-time analytics, and reporting. Alteon's integrated application protection has helped us. As a state government agency, we face increasing threats and need to secure our critical web applications. Our finance websites are the primary targets for DDoS, SQL injections, and other sophisticated attacks. Traditional security is insufficient to defend against the volume and complexity of the attacks. We need protection against attacks on the application and infrastructure layers and DDoS attacks. Alteon offers visibility and actionable insights into each security event. Radware has free training available on their website. I've completed a few training courses and found them very helpful for me in my daily work. The basic course covering the UI takes a week, and it was easy to understand. When we're troubleshooting a scenario, we can check the Alteon knowledge base articles. The combination of training and the knowledge base shortens the learning curve.
Shashank N - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good stability, but the agent-based approach could be more convenient
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. Additionally, the agent-based approach presents challenges with managing agents across versions and dependencies on specific application platforms like Apache or NGINX, leading to compatibility issues and complexity in integration. This agent-based system proved particularly difficult to manage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."
"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."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"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 is a fast and secure DNS."
"I like the ADC feature and the global certificate feature."
"The most valuable feature of Radware LinkProof is that it supports link load balance."
"Alteon helps us troubleshoot issues. It provides us statistics on application, server, and load balancer response that we can use to identify problems or latency."
"I like the concept of self-service, that I can do everything on my own."
"The most valuable feature is the load-balancing reverse proxy."
"The best part is that we are able to manage it easily. It is easy to manage and easy to integrate with third-party applications."
"The performance and stability are the most valuable features."
"The features that mitigate attacks are very valuable."
"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

"Technical support is lacking."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"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."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."
"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."
"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."
"Recently our team was talking about the things you can customize in Alteon and the level of programming that doing so demands. I would like to see more information on how to customize the programming and troubleshoot."
"I would like to see the loading documentation improved."
"Integration with cloud services could be improved. Every now and then, we need engagement to address challenges with cloud integrations."
"Their support can be better. The Radware management is very proactive. We can connect to anybody in Radware Management in India. We can even connect with the MD of Radware India. However, their lower level staff should be more proactive towards the customers."
"The GUI needs to be improved. Right now, the solution isn't so user-friendly."
"Load balancing needs improvement. It needs better integration. I heard f5 works as a DNS operator which is not available in this solution. It would be better if that was implemented."
"I would like this solution to have an integration tool that will convert configuration from other software, into readable values for this product during implementation."
"You need to have pretty good internal knowledge of the solution."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"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

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"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."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"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."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The pricing seems reasonable to me for what the solution provides. It is within the parameters of this type of solution."
"We have three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain more discounts. It seems to be a much cheaper alternative."
"It is the best in the industry. It was better than the competition, and that is what made us go ahead with them."
"The solution is cost-efficient."
"I'm content with Alteon's pricing."
"Our government agency opted for Radware Alteon due to its affordability and efficiency. While I can't say precisely how much it costs the organization, the price per device. In India, we always look for affordable products, so I assume Alteon is cost-effective because the government chose it."
"The Radware team we work with always gives us the best price. As a university, our budget is limited. We need something that is the best solution but with a low or economical pricing. We are getting a better price than competitors. The shift from Barracuda to Alteon was primarily due to cost efficiency. It is very economical, and the price fits our business needs."
"The pricing is better than the competition. It is getting more pricey as the years go on, as more people are migrating to it, and as the technology gets better."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The product has an affordable cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
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 do you like most about Radware Alteon?
It saves us a lot of work in terms of management since it has tasks already defined automatically. That enables us to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Alteon?
We have a three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain mo...
What needs improvement with Radware Alteon?
It is a fairly complete service and it is difficult for me to think of what can be improved. A feature that I would l...
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
Alteon, Radware AppWall
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.
Convergys
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Find out what your peers are saying about Radware Alteon vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.