We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) 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."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."
"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."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"I've worked a little bit with iRules and it is amazing."
"It is a fast and available solution."
"It is an easy way to build application policies (graphical)."
"It is the perfect solution when you have high workloads in your IT environment."
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a stable and reliable solution."
"F5's attack signatures and automation are the most valuable features. The disaster recovery capabilities are also excellent. You don't need to do anything. It has automatic failover from production."
"It integrates with AWS WAF, which makes it easy to deploy without changes to your infrastructure."
"It provides first-tier firewalling, for you application. And it provides server load-balancing, it provides optimization, and it provides a proxy feature, where your users cannot directly access your server. It acts as a fully proxy architecture. It has client-side and server-side connections, both, and they're separate."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain 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."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"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."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"The pricing of the product is a bit too high."
"The management interface is unclear, complex, and not concise. I would like a better user interface."
"The pricing model has caused some frustration. My clients implemented the solution and later wanted to upgrade the features but the pricing structure was complicated. There are other solutions with better pricing models."
"The license terms for "non-commercial" will be a challenge for us."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would expect more integration with different platforms and more integration with the backend systems. Additionally, in the next release, I would like a more secure version."
"If they made it easier for engineers to get F5 training then it would be better."
"F5 BIG-IP LTM can improve on the SSL loading which includes the authentication of certificates. Although, most of these issues have been solved there are still some issue that persists."
"Right now, there are a lot of products within F5's portfolio. They acquired a couple of companies like NGINX and Volterra. Some features and technologies overlapped when this acquisition occurred. They need to refine it and come up with a single, proper solution. F5 should focus more on zero trust network access (ZTNA).They should be more focused on that framework because the industry is moving towards that. Everyone is talking about SASE and zero trust."
More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cloudflare is ranked 1st in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection with 57 reviews while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is ranked 1st in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 116 reviews. Cloudflare is rated 8.4, while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is rated 8.2. 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 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) writes "Reduces maintenance downtime and has a strong user community". Cloudflare is most compared with Akamai, Azure Front Door, Imperva DDoS, AWS Shield and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, whereas F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is most compared with Citrix NetScaler, Fortinet FortiADC, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus and A10 Networks Thunder ADC. See our Cloudflare vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) 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.
