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The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) 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)
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)
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.
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.
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

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"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."
"Helps us to monitor situation in regards to attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"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'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."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"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."
"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."
"The biggest problem for us was the stability and speed using the first version of Wallarm. Now, it is fine."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"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."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"​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
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
20%
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
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 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.
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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
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.
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Panasonic. Miro. Rappi. Wargaming. Gannett. Omio. Acronis. Workforce Software. Tipalti. SEMRush.
Find out what your peers are saying about The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) vs. Wallarm NG WAF and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.