Cloudflare and F5 Silverline Managed Services compete in the application security and traffic management sector. Cloudflare seems to have the upper hand due to its cost-effectiveness and ease of use.
Features: Cloudflare offers a robust suite of features including CDN, DDoS protection, and free SSL certificates. It excels in providing excellent ease of setup and valuable analytics. F5 Silverline Managed Services focuses on application security and offers flexible traffic management as well as centralized certificate management, with its 24/7 mitigation service being crucial for users.
Room for Improvement: Cloudflare could enhance its analytics capabilities and reduce error issues like 501 and 504. Users desire improvements in CDN speed and seek more interactive support and better API usability. F5 Silverline Managed Services users suggest lowering costs, adding automation, and enhancing cloud protection features. User latency and the limited number of PoPs are notable concerns impacting speed compared to competitors.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare is used widely in public and hybrid cloud settings with versatile deployment options. Customer service is generally positive despite some delays. F5 Silverline Managed Services offers on-premises and public cloud deployment for flexible implementation with customer service rated positively, although some users prefer more thorough technical support.
Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare's free services and incremental pricing plans are attractive for small to medium enterprises, providing significant value despite higher tier costs. F5 Silverline Managed Services is deemed expensive but is recognized for high-quality comprehensive security features, offering various pricing plans with an emphasis on its sophistication and service quality.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
The key factor is the language in which the support is offered, which, in this case, is in Thai.
Their support team is responsive, and they deliver timely updates, addressing any glitches promptly.
They resolve the issues by joining me to fix them.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
F5 Silverline Managed Services is scalable enough without observed limitations.
The solution is fully scalable, and I would give it a rating of ten on a scale of one to ten for scalability.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
They offer regular updates, and overall, I would rate the stability of the solution as nine out of ten.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
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.
Introducing preemptive support prompts would reduce the manual effort required for creating policies or blocking specific IPs.
Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high.
On a scale where ten is very expensive, I would rate the pricing as three.
The solution is expensive
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
It allows for centralized management of certificates, protecting applications from top ten attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
The monitoring tab displays GET and POST requests in a readable format, making it accessible even to non-tech-savvy individuals.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 18.8% |
| F5 Silverline Managed Services | 1.3% |
| Other | 79.9% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 46 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 25 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 6 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity 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 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's 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.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company
F5's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.
Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.
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.
