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Cloudflare vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

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Buyer's Guide
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
May 2024
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, NETSCOUT, Akamai and others in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection.
To learn more, read our detailed Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection Report (Updated: May 2024).
Download the complete report
772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Anonymous User
Good agility and security with a great load balancer
Cloudflare's solution brought us more agility, security, and confidence in managing the environment. We have seen that there are very few failures... Read more →
Anonymous User
Offers Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) and provides enhanced dashboards, making it easy to identify and allow...
It gives us fully enhanced dashboards, making it easy to identify and allow or deny traffic based on the signals it provides. Fastly (Signal... Read more →
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack.""The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules.""It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls.""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.""The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution.""Cloudflare has many features.""Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.""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."

More Cloudflare Pros →

"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."

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Cons
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag.""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.""Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client.""Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript.""Technical support is lacking.""The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it.""I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution.""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."

More Cloudflare Cons →

"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.""Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."

More The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if 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."
  • "There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
  • "The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
  • "We don't have any issues with the price."
  • "The price is reasonable."
  • "The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
  • "It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

    • More Cloudflare Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
  • "The product has an affordable cost."
  • "The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."

    • More The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
    CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions: Incapsula and Cloudflare. This test was designed to bypass security controls in place, in any possible way, circumventing whatever filters they have. Given the rise in application-level attacks, the goal of the test was to provide IT managers of online businesses with a comparison of these WAFs against real-world threats in simulated real-world conditions. Zero Science Lab is a Macedonian Information Security Research and Development Laboratory that specializes in information security hardening, consulting, network security, vulnerability research, software and hardware security assessment, penetration testing, malware analysis, forensics and much more - https://www.zeroscience.mk Background In February 2013, we conducted the first comparative pentest analysis of the CloudFlare, Incapsula and ModSecurity Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions. The goal of a WAF is to block hacker attacks / unwanted malicious traffic to your web application with as few false positives as possible. Since then, all three vendors had replied to the findings, applying patches to the discovered bypasses and improving their products to protect their… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring a...
    Top Answer:Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds by… more »
    Read all 8 answers   →
    What do you like most about Cloudflare?
    Top Answer:Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
    Read all 22 answers   →
    What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
    Top Answer:The product's pricing is cheap.
    Read all 21 answers   →
    What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
    Top Answer:The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
    Read all 2 answers   →
    What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?
    Top Answer:The pricing is 50% less than Akamai.
    Read all 3 answers   →
    What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
    Top Answer:Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.
    Read all 3 answers   →
    Ranking
    1st
    out of 44 in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
    Views
    8,520
    Comparisons
    7,297
    Reviews
    18
    Average Words per Review
    508
    Rating
    8.3
    24th
    out of 82 in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    Views
    836
    Comparisons
    630
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    604
    Rating
    7.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
    Learn More
    Cloudflare
    Fastly
    Video Not Available
    Overview

    Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distribution Denial of Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can use the solution and experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

    Currently, there are millions of internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

    Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the information requests are always only seconds away.

    Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to access Cloudflare highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project Athenian, also at no additional cost.

    Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end-users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD ( bring your own device) access ensure end-users and employees always have the best resources and technology available to them at all times.



    Cloudflare Benefits

    Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

    • Faster load times
    • Robust DNS security
    • Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    • Free universal SSL
    • Image Enhancement
    • Automatic Browser Caching
    • Next-generation cloud load balancer
    • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
    • Rate Limiting
    • Minification
    • Zero-trust capabilities 
    • Cost-effective
    • Reduced carbon footprint

    Reviews from Real Users

    “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. If you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a certificate.”  Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

    “What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network engineer at Ufinet

    “The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” A PeerSpot user who is a Competence Center Manager at a tech services company. 

    The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) provides web application and API protection, RASP, rate limiting, bot protection and DDoS purpose built to eliminate the challenges of legacy WAF.

    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Comms Service Provider22%
    Engineering Company13%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization38%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Comms Service Provider4%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization24%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business65%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise23%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise46%
    Large Enterprise36%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise52%
    Buyer's Guide
    Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
    May 2024
    Download Free Report
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, NETSCOUT, Akamai and others in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection. Updated: May 2024.
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    772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cloudflare is ranked 1st in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection with 57 reviews while The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is ranked 24th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 3 reviews. Cloudflare is rated 8.4, while The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is rated 7.6. 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 The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) writes "Offers Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) and provides enhanced dashboards, making it easy to identify and allow or deny traffic based on the signals it provides". Cloudflare is most compared with Akamai, Azure Front Door, Imperva DDoS, AWS Shield and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, whereas The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is most compared with AWS WAF, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Azure Web Application Firewall, Imperva Web Application Firewall and Akamai App and API Protector.

    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.