We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and F5 Advanced WAF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The UI is good."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"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."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"It can scale."
"It protects and mitigates damage in the network."
"The solution uses AI to protect against botnet attacks."
"One of the most valuable features is the Local Traffic Manager."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily."
"F5's user-friendly interface and seamless integration stand out as the most valuable features for us."
"Good dashboard and reporting."
"We can monitor IP locations, but we have constraints from each country. It has a replication feature. Licenses can be shared, taking turns with each license."
"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."
"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."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"Technical support is lacking."
"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."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"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."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"There should be more ability to rate limit certain scenarios. The majority of the time, it is either on or off. For certain types of use cases, there should be the ability to rate limit, not just enable or disable."
"They could provide better pricing."
"The solution could improve by having an independent capture module. It has a built feature that you can deploy the capture on your published website. However, it's not very user-friendly. When you compare this feature to Google Capture or other enterprise captures, they are very simple. It needs a good connection to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. When you implement this feature in the data center, you may suffer some complications with connecting to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. This should be improved in the future."
"The accuracy of the automatic learning feature needs improvement."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features."
"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."
"The BNS module needs improvement."
"Nevertheless, F5 products are generally considered to be hard to deploy."
Cloudflare is ranked 1st in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection with 57 reviews while F5 Advanced WAF is ranked 2nd in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 55 reviews. Cloudflare is rated 8.4, while F5 Advanced WAF is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cloudflare writes "It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of F5 Advanced WAF writes "Flexible configuration, reliable, and highly professional support". Cloudflare is most compared with Akamai, Azure Front Door, Imperva DDoS, AWS Shield and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, whereas F5 Advanced WAF is most compared with Fortinet FortiWeb, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, AWS WAF, Imperva Web Application Firewall and Fastly. See our Cloudflare vs. F5 Advanced WAF report.
We monitor all Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
