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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
8.4
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)
Radware Alteon
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
47
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) (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.
MaverickHurley - PeerSpot reviewer
Makes it easier and quicker to spin up services when we deploy applications
The most valuable aspect is the ability to customize the types of load-balancing scenarios needed for customized applications. Some of the load balancers on the market today are strictly out-of-hand load balancers for SSL or HTTP. Radware Alteon is most useful for customizing in-house applications based on ports and protocols. Another great feature is integrated application protection. There are many features you can activate. Some of them are add-ons, such as WAF protection, DDoS, rate-limiting, and connections-per-second per application. We also use Radware where we do all the programming.
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

"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"It's very user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"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."
"The UI is user-friendly."
"The product offers high availability."
"The command line interface is simple and very user-friendly."
"Security is one of the most valuable features that I like. It is easy to use and easy to configure."
"The health status information, with its highly detailed reporting, has saved us time on troubleshooting. We have the precise information needed that helps us find different types of situations."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
"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

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"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."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"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."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"I would like to see future enhancements in security, specifically in threat protection."
"We’d like the solution to include more security features in the standard license."
"I would like to see the loading documentation improved."
"We don't integrate anything with it because most things don't integrate with Radware. If it were F5, we could integrate it. We can integrate F5 with practically anything that integrates with a load balancer, but that's not the case with Alteon."
"Support is very important because if we get good support, we'll be able to sell and supply more numbers."
"A feature that I would like to see included in the next version might be a better analysis when working with crypt issues. Right now, it is very manual; you load it into Alteon and it runs. It would be interesting to see a more dynamic process."
"We are having a difficult time with the security module, and how to implement the Radware security."
"The interface implementation can be improved."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"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 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."
"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."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"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 cost-efficient. That is why we have gone with Alteon. As a product, it is efficient and robust. We have not faced any issues with the device."
"It is the best in the industry. It was better than the competition, and that is what made us go ahead with them."
"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."
"Alteon's price is excellent compared to other solutions. F5 costs around twice as much. We still have about three years left before this hardware reaches the end of its life. We're migrating to the cloud, and phasing some of this out, but it's nice that they've given us a long window to keep their hardware in place."
"The price conforms to what the tool provides. It is not an inexpensive tool and not all companies can afford an ADC solution such as Alteon. However, it justifies its price with the options it offers."
"The pricing seems reasonable to me for what the solution provides. It is within the parameters of this type of solution."
"Radware Alteon is less expensive than many of the other competitors."
"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
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing 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

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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: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.