Aikido Security vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

Aikido Security vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.0%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Aikido Security is 0.3%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	4.0%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.9%
Aikido Security	0.3%
Other	93.8%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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B Goswami

Product Manager at Zidio development

Security has shifted left and now catches vulnerabilities early in our development workflow

There are a few areas for improvement. The first is scan speed. For large repositories, initial scans can be slow. Incremental scanning helps, but full scans still take considerable time. The second thing is the false positive rate. While Auto-Triage is good, it is not perfect. Occasionally, genuine issues get filtered out and real false positives slip through. The third one is remediation guidance. Aikido Security tells you what is vulnerable, but sometimes the fix suggestions are generic. More specific, actionable remediation steps would save developer time. The fourth one is IDE integrations. It currently works best in CI/CD pipelines. A proper VS Code or JetBrains plugin for real-time scanning while coding would be a significant improvement. From a customer point of view, the following things could change. The first thing is documentation for custom rules. Aikido Security allows you to create custom scanning rules, but the documentation for this feature is surprisingly thin. I spent considerable time in community forums and with trial and error just to configure basic custom rules. Step-by-step guides with real-world examples would make this feature much more accessible. The second thing is better Slack and communication integrations. Currently, security alerts come through email and dashboard notifications, but our team lives in Slack. A more configurable Slack integration that sends contextual alerts directly to the relevant developer, not just a generic channel notification, would dramatically improve response time. The third one is historical trend reporting. While Aikido Security shows current vulnerability status well, generating historical reports showing security posture improvement over time is limited. For presenting security progress to management or stakeholders, better exportable trend reports would be very valuable.

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Mohan Janarthanan

Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions

Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."

"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."

"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."

"It is configurable via API."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"Aikido Security saved me several hours each week by automating vulnerability scanning and security checks, reducing the need for manual review and helping me focus on more development."

"Aikido Security has positively impacted my organization significantly because initially we were thinking it would take a month for us to achieve SOC 2 compliance again, and with Aikido Security, we were able to get all codebase vulnerability fixes within a week for all our 13 or 14 repositories that we had."

"Aikido Security nests directly in our development workflow and it catches security issues before they reach production."

"Aikido Security offers the best features including being very easy to use, allowing even a normal tech person with some hands-on experience to use this tool and clearly get the results they want."

"Since switching to Aikido Security, I have noticed a positive impact on my team's productivity with measurable results, as we now have measurements."

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."

"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."

"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."

"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."

Cons

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

"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."

"Its stability could be better."

"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."

"Support can be challenging at times."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"I think Aikido Security could be improved with more detailed remediation guidance, such as additional beginner-friendly tutorials and enhanced customization for alerts and reporting."

"However, there was one minor issue that I faced. When I had a UUID for an object in the code, Aikido Security was considering it as a secret key, which it was not."

"There are a few areas for improvement. The first is scan speed; for large repositories, initial scans can be slow, and while incremental scanning helps, full scans still take considerable time."

"I think Aikido Security could be improved by addressing its Jira integration, which I feel needs a bit of work."

"I think Aikido Security could improve by reducing some pricing model. Pricing is quite high for a normal user, and if they can make it a little less, it will be much better."

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."

"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."

"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"The solution is expensive."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	2

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

What needs improvement with Aikido Security?

There are a few areas for improvement. The first is scan speed. For large repositories, initial scans can be slow. In...

What is your primary use case for Aikido Security?

I have been using Aikido Security for approximately more than one year, primarily for securing our development pipeli...

What advice do you have for others considering Aikido Security?

I have several practical pieces of advice for anyone considering Aikido Security. The first one is to connect all rep...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.

What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I need to think about this for the future. F5 Distributed Cloud Services needs to create links with Amazon and Google...

What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I collect reviews for F5 Distributed Cloud Services and F5 Silverline Managed Services. I work with F5 Distributed Cl...

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Product Reports

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Download Aikido Security product report

F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall integrates DDoS protection, load balancing, and firewall capabilities. Its ease of use, configurability, and robust security measures make it a versatile choice for protecting web applications.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive defense against threats with advanced reporting and robust security measures. It includes DNS integration, rate limiting, and extensive rule sets, all within a SaaS model that allows API configurability. Users value its caching, scalability, and pricing, although enhancements are needed in rate-limiting and third-party integration. Improvements in customer support, especially in India, real-time controls, and user documentation are also desired. Users seek a more intuitive dashboard, better log management, and improved alert systems, along with multitenancy capabilities and enhanced reporting.

What are the key features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

DDoS Protection: Shields applications from denial-of-service attacks
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution
DNS Integration: Enhances domain name system security
Rate Limiting: Controls traffic flow and reduces abuse
Extensive Rule Sets: Offers customizable security rules

What benefits and ROI can users find in reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing business needs
Pricing: Offers reasonable pricing structure
Caching: Improves application performance and speed
Configurable Security: Provides customizable defense settings
Efficient Management: Simplifies security and application control

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall finds application in industries like banking and retail by acting as a comprehensive security gateway, managing authentication and authorization while protecting web applications from malicious Layer 7 traffic. It also implements load balancing, CDN, and zero-trust policies, supported by advanced reporting, analytics tools, and threat scoring to meet specific industry needs.

Cloudflare

Aikido Security is the no-nonsense platform that empowers developers by centralizing code-to-cloud security issues and providing rapid guidance for fixing vulnerabilities.

With over 6,000 teams utilizing its features, Aikido Security prioritizes effective security management by consolidating 11 comprehensive scans into one platform. This approach translates complex vulnerabilities into understandable insights, targeting non-enterprise SaaS businesses with engineering teams of 10-500 developers. It focuses on delivering security management without excessive costs or complexity through a product-led growth model.

What are the standout features of Aikido Security?

SAST: Secures code as it is written.
DAST: Monitors surfaces, dynamically tests for vulnerabilities with OWASP ZAP.
IaC: Detects infrastructure vulnerabilities.
CSPM: Real-time detection of cloud infrastructure risks.
Container Scanning: Assesses container environments for risky packages.
Secrets Detection: Identifies exposed API keys, passwords.
Open Source Dependencies: Analyzes dependencies to avoid vulnerabilities.
Open Source License: Maps and exports SBOMs to manage license risks.
Malware Detection: Protects from supply chain attacks.
Runtime Protection: Secures apps with an embedded firewall.
Custom Scans: Integrates with existing tools like SonarQube.

Why should you consider Aikido Security?

Easy Adoption: Setup takes less than 3 minutes with clear UX.
Cost Efficiency: Offers a comprehensive 9-in-1 solution at competitive pricing.
Accurate Results: Best false positive reduction in the market.

In industries like software development and cloud services, Aikido Security is implemented to provide clear insights, enabling teams to focus on rapid product growth while maintaining robust security. Its product-led growth strategy, including a freemium offering, allows developers to experience benefits firsthand without initial investment.

Aikido Security

F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

FinTech GoCardless ZIP CertifID HealthTech Dental Intelligence PE & Group Techstars Cronos Group Security Tech Human Security Tines HR Tech Simployer Recruitee Agency November Five Other Lighthouse (Hospitality Tech) Smokeball (LegalTech) Runna (B2C Tech) GEA Group (Manufacturing) Community fibre (Telecom) n8n (Software Development)

Information Not Available

Aikido Security vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services