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Aikido Security vs NGINX App Protect comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare WAF offers quick ROI, crucial protection for e-commerce, saves bandwidth, and balances cost with valuable free features.
Sentiment score
7.8
Aikido Security increased efficiency, reduced costs, and expedited compliance, enhancing productivity and automating tasks significantly for organizations.
Sentiment score
5.8
NGINX App Protect offers notable ROI, enhancing security, integrating with CICD pipelines, and providing compliance and time-saving benefits.
My experience with the pricing or licensing of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is that many features can be accessed for free, so the pricing is definitely reasonable.
Owner at Hga consulting
Aikido Security caught a critical remote code execution vulnerability in my Python machine learning pipelines before it reached production.
Product Manager at Zidio development
Since we got rid of that, our productivity has increased, I believe, by thirty-two percent.
SecOps Engineer at IriusRisk
We were expecting to complete the compliance in a month, but I figured out Aikido Security could do it within a week for all our 13 repositories.
Co-Founder & CTO at Mango Giraffe
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.3
Cloudflare WAF support is mixed; responsive for some, but Indian customers face call availability and administrative issues.
Sentiment score
7.5
Aikido Security's customer support is efficient, technically robust, with quick responses, proactive onboarding, and transparent communication valued by users.
Sentiment score
5.8
NGINX App Protect's support is reliable and helpful, though costs and occasional delays affect accessibility for some users.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to contact them.
Owner at Hga consulting
The technical support of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between five and seven at maximum.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
Aikido Security was the easiest to use, the easiest to onboard, and the one with the most active customer support.
SecOps Engineer at IriusRisk
Their team proactively reached out after signup to ensure we were set up correctly.
Product Manager at Zidio development
Customer support is good; if you raise a query, hardly within a day, your issues get resolved.
Security Researcher at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
They were quick and efficient when we had issues.
Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the customer support a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Tech Lead at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall offers impressive scalability and automated management, but additional features may incur costs for smaller organizations.
Sentiment score
8.0
Aikido Security scales efficiently with excellent integration, minor peak delays, and occasional display issues after updates, supporting multiple teams.
Sentiment score
6.1
NGINX App Protect offers strong scalability praised by users, despite challenges with policy limits and deployment delays.
The scalability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between 8 to 9, as it depends upon the use cases and what exactly the client needs.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
That kind of reliability becomes invisible when it works well, which is exactly what you want from a security tool running in your CI/CD pipelines.
Product Manager at Zidio development
Aikido Security scales well by supporting multiple projects, repositories, and development teams on a single platform.
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
You can deploy it on your team, and if you have a large team, it works very well.
Security Researcher at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The scalability of NGINX App Protect is good and open source at its best.
Tech Lead at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is praised for stability, high performance, effective protection, daily use, and minimal downtime.
Sentiment score
8.7
Aikido Security is highly stable and reliable, with consistent operation and minimal delays affecting user workflows and releases.
Sentiment score
8.4
Users praise NGINX App Protect's stability and reliability, outperforming competitors, handling high traffic efficiently, and receiving high ratings.
The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
The platform has been reliable and provides accurate security findings.
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
It remains stable even when generating a large amount of code.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
It is a quality solution, and I would rate its stability as eight out of ten.
IT Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare WAF needs feature enhancements, better usability, improved support, advanced DDoS protection, and solutions for latency and alerts.
Aikido Security needs improved integrations, customization, monitoring, documentation, speed, automation, AI, and pricing to enhance user experience.
NGINX App Protect needs enhancements in automation, UI, security, performance, and support, with complex setup and integration issues.
The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available.
Network Architect at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
I think they're doing a good job with DNS and as support for any domains that I create or that my clients create, it's mandatory for me to ensure they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider.
Owner at Hga consulting
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.
CTO at PlayNirvana
I would love to see a Terraform module for Aikido Security.
SecOps Engineer at IriusRisk
I had a certain object with a UUID that was being considered as a private secret key or API key, which was not the case.
Co-Founder & CTO at Mango Giraffe
Aikido Security tells you what is vulnerable, but sometimes the fix suggestions are generic.
Product Manager at Zidio development
There was more information from F5 regarding hardware requirements and specifications to deploy the service.
IT Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
For now, I think NGINX App Protect is good, but maybe I would like to see the logging feature added.
Dev Ops Engineer at BARQ Systems
The GUI and web GUI configuration could be improved to be easier to manage and use.
Dev Ops Engineer at adesso AG
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall offers affordable, flexible pricing with no upfront costs, noted for competitiveness and included support services.
NGINX App Protect offers reasonable annual pricing, ranging from $25,000 to $400,000, aligning with industry-leading solutions.
I used the free trial, which was sufficient for evaluating the platform and its core features.
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
Aikido Security has a plan for $4,200 annually for up to 10 users.
Technical leader at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing is reasonable and based on the repository; they charge accordingly.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides comprehensive security features, easy setup, scalability, and competitive pricing with praised performance and stability.
Aikido Security provides an intuitive dashboard, seamless integrations, accurate scanning, and actionable insights to enhance security and workflow efficiency.
NGINX App Protect provides comprehensive security features including automation, real-time threat detection, DDoS protection, and flexible deployment options.
The custom rules and the geo-redundant geographical rule feature, which allows me to implement geographical rules for customers, add significant value.
Network Architect at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
The best features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall are multiple, including the WAF, rate limiter, and bot attack protection.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools add a layer that we're able to visualize and see before it actually hits the local firewall.
Owner at Hga consulting
We were able to get all codebase vulnerability fixes within a week for all our 13 or 14 repositories that we had.
Co-Founder & CTO at Mango Giraffe
Security shifted left, meaning issues were caught during development rather than after deployment.
Product Manager at Zidio development
My favorite feature is the dependency vulnerability scanning because it quickly identifies the risk in third-party packages, which saves me time in finding vulnerabilities.
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
The most valuable feature is the ability to operate in a DevOps environment and to be configured through API and pipeline by the developers themselves.
IT Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Some threats like injection and running scripts, SQL injections, these all get stopped and rejected by the server.
Dev Ops Engineer at BARQ Systems
Detecting bots and blocking IPs have proven effective for securing applications.
Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...
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Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Aikido Security
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
22nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (13th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (8th), Container Security (22nd), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (8th), Static Code Analysis (8th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (6th), DevSecOps (7th), Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) (6th)
NGINX App Protect
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
19th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (28th), API Security (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 3.8%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Aikido Security is 0.4%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX App Protect is 2.1%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall3.8%
NGINX App Protect2.1%
Aikido Security0.4%
Other93.7%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
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.
Tarun Goswami_ - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Valerio Guaglianone - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at adesso AG
Long-term web protection has supported reliable traffic management but needs a simpler interface
NGINX App Protect is a good product. I have used both versions from F5 -also the free version- (I mean the NGINX/NGINX One/App Protect free trial period), and I think it is a good product. It's stable, affordable, and easy to manage. NGINX App Protect is a comprehensive security solution that combines advanced WAF, DoS protection, API security, and DevSecOps automation in a lightweight, scalable package ideal for modern cloud-native architectures. The adaptive machine learning capabilities are truly commendable, as the solution can establish traffic baselines and detect anomalies in real time. It automatically adjusts security policies, minimizing the need for manual intervention and reducing false positives. Additionally, it supports scalable deployment across diverse environments, including on-premises, cloud, Kubernetes, and containers, offering both flexibility and scalability I have experience with the web server, F5 load balancer, and similar products provided by Ergon, for eg. the web application firewall and the Microgateway for K8S. I'm also familiar with F5 BIG-IP products.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

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?
Aikido Security could be improved by allowing us to scan the entire network, not just the applications, but also devi...
What is your primary use case for Aikido Security?
My main use case for Aikido Security is vulnerability scanning of our internal applications. We have a development de...
What advice do you have for others considering Aikido Security?
My advice for others looking into using Aikido Security is to take into account that they will get a robust solution ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?
I will not be able to answer about my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for NGINX App Protect, as so...
What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?
I did not face any issues with NGINX App Protect. The only issue that we had is that someone was trying to install th...
What is your primary use case for NGINX App Protect?
I have been dealing with NGINX App Protect and the WAF policy. I usually recommend NGINX App Protect for banking and ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Aikido Security vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: July 2026.
909,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.