We performed a comparison between Cloudflare Web Application Firewall and F5 Advanced WAF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The initial setup process is simple."
"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."
"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the security features and the protection."
"It's scalable and very easy to manage."
"Identification, ease of use, and ease of modifying it to most of our needs are valuable."
"The solution uses AI to protect against botnet attacks."
"It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the rules per the requirements."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its grand unity of the implementation, where you have the freedom to configure based on how it affects your use case or your organization. With the default setting of implicit deny, you can gradually start defining and deploying the tool to align with your environment, whether it is outdated, recent, or futuristic. This allows you to customize the solution to protect you from threat actors. You have the ability to define what the advanced threat act should do - whether it should alert, deny, or both - and it will deliver based on your configuration. Unlike other online solutions, F5 Advanced WAF provides flexibility to deliver to your unique environment the way you want."
"One of the most valuable features is the Local Traffic Manager."
"My favorite feature of F5 is the ability to play around with the ciphers. I also like the ability to have an immediate display of the support IDs when a real blockage occurs. The protection offered is great."
"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."
"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."
"The reporting could be more granular."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."
"Scalability could be improved."
"For me, an area for improvement in F5 Advanced WAF is the reporting as it isn't so clear. The vendor needs to work on the reporting capability of the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of F5 Advanced WAF is threat intelligence to protect your web application, particularly having that capability out-of-the-box, and not needing to pay extra for it, similar to what's offered in FortiWeb, for example, any request that originates from a malicious IP will be blocked automatically by FortiWeb. F5 Advanced WAF should have the intelligence for blocking malicious IPs, or automatically blocking threats included in the license, instead of making it an add-on feature that users have to pay for apart from the standard licensing fees."
"It should be a little bit easy to deploy in terms of the overall deployment session. One of our customers is a bit unhappy about the reporting options. Currently, it automatically deletes event logs after some limit if a customer doesn't have any external Syslog server. It is a problem for those customers who want to review event logs after a week or so because they won't get proper reports or event logs. They should increase the duration to at least a month or two for storing the data on the device. F5 is not a leader in Gartner Quadrant, which affects us when we go and pitch this solution. Customers normally go and take a look at such annual reports, and because F5 is currently not there as a leader, the customers ask about it even though we are saying it is good in all things. F5 is not known for something totally different or unique. They were a major player in ADP, and they are just rebranding themselves into security. They should improve or increase their marketing as a security company now. They have already started to do that, but they should do it more so that when it comes to security, customers can easily remember F5. At the moment, if we say F5, load balancing comes to mind. With rebranding and marketing, all customers should get the idea that F5 is now mainly focusing on the security part of it, and it is a security company instead of load balancing. This is the first solution that should come to a customer's mind for a web application firewall."
"The BIG-IQ is supposed to centralize the management for all of the boxes but it's not very effective."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve the precision of the scanning. There are many false positives. They should improve their threat database."
"We get false positives sometimes."
"The pricing could be more flexible."
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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is ranked 7th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 16 reviews while F5 Advanced WAF is ranked 2nd in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 55 reviews. Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is rated 8.2, while F5 Advanced WAF is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall writes "A cloud solution for web application firewall protection with rate-limiting, managed, and custom firewall rules". On the other hand, the top reviewer of F5 Advanced WAF writes "Flexible configuration, reliable, and highly professional support". Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Akamai App and API Protector, AWS WAF, Fortinet FortiWeb and Radware Alteon, whereas F5 Advanced WAF is most compared with Fortinet FortiWeb, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, AWS WAF, Imperva Web Application Firewall and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). See our Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. F5 Advanced WAF report.
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