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."New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"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."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"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."
"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."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"With F5 Advanced WAF, it was protection for online publications and for our customers that caused us to choose the platform."
"F5 Advanced WAF is a stable solution, we are satisfied. It is more stable than ForiWeb."
"Very easy to implement and works well."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its ability to have a pool of resources that can distribute your traffic, and that is a plus for me. My company tried to look into a competitor, Imperva, but it was lacking that capability, so F5 Advanced WAF outperforms Imperva."
"The solution isn't too expensive. The license allows you to license what you need and leave out what you don't need."
"F5 technical support is excellent. They are experts who always provide the right solution, and they understand the problem. Their response and resolution times are good."
"There are a lot of good features."
"It's flexible and powerful, and the users can input their own rules to the system."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"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."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"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."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"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."
"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."
"The accuracy of the automatic learning feature needs improvement."
"You have to buy another module with an extra license, to have the authentication feature."
"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 Sandbox integration feature could be improved."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features."
"The pricing could be more flexible."
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.
