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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
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
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
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) (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

"The UI is good."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"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."
"A user-friendly and reasonably priced solution."
"I like the concept of self-service, that I can do everything on my own."
"It saves us a lot of work in terms of management since it has tasks already defined automatically. That enables us to better administer our services. It is very dynamic and easy to administer."
"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 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."
"It is easy to expand. Our clients are enterprise-size."
"The integrated application protection provided by Alteon is very good. It really helps to avoid false positives in some cases. It provides important granularity to avoid a situation in which security or cybersecurity scenarios escape us."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"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

"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."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"The service could be improved by better customer support."
"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 to see future enhancements in security, specifically in threat protection."
"They keep integrating new features that sometimes break our production, but we use clustered systems, so we can test those software releases."
"The user interface can be improved."
"Scalability should be based on customer requirements."
"The solution could be more open to additional third-party add-ons being integrated into it."
"The interface implementation can be improved."
"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

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"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."
"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."
"I'm content with Alteon's pricing."
"The cost of Radware Alteon is mid-ranged."
"The pricing seems reasonable to me for what the solution provides. It is within the parameters of this type of solution."
"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 solution is cost-efficient."
"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."
"It is not the priciest and it is not the cheapest. For our solution, it was right in the middle of price performance."
"It has a good price point and is more reasonable than other comparable products"
"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
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
11%
Retailer
7%
Educational Organization
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
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 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: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.