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Airlock vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th)
Airlock
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
9.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (40th)
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
124
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Airlock0.8%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.7%
Fortinet FortiWeb6.0%
Other85.5%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)13.0%
NetScaler12.1%
HAProxy8.9%
Other66.0%
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

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.
Tiodor Jovovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Business Officer at Sky Express
Provides endless features and can be adapted to every single application that exists in the world
WAF is the most beneficial feature for security posture. Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product. The level of detail of the configuration is the most significant aspect. We can adapt it to every single application that exists in the world. The product helps with the compliance processes.
edshyaa - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at Stryker
Load balancing has improved traffic distribution and currently supports high availability upgrades
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) offers effective load balancing methods that help distribute traffic across our servers, whether we have two or several. This load balancing feature stands out as it is the fundamental work we do with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). While I recognize there are many features, such as iRules, which I have not explored yet, we primarily work on VIPs, pool members, and traffic distribution. The load balancing algorithms' flexibility makes them very useful for our team, enabling us to choose different servers and manage load effectively. We use various methods based on user or application requirements, making the algorithms set up by F5 in the backend quite helpful. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) positively impacts our organization primarily through its load balancing capabilities. We avoid traffic overload on individual servers by placing backend servers behind F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) VIP. This load balancing helps us manage traffic effectively. Since the configuration of the I-series, we have had smooth performance, and with the recent migration to the R-series, it is working faster than before, providing positive outcomes for our operations. Since moving to the R-series, I notice improved performance; it is user-friendly and handles traffic efficiently. The upgrading process is different as we create tenants and a main host. R-series has better CPU and memory, leading to higher throughput with minimal downtime, making it a significant improvement over the I-series.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."
"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."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."
"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product."
"In terms of our primary use cases, all our web services, our main web portals, and our TV service sit behind the F5, so any customer would have to traverse our F5 for the services at the back of it."
"There is a lot of documentation available."
"The product is quite flexible."
"F5 delivers a full range of solutions that simplify service providers’ security architectures while mitigating threats."
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) positively impacts our organization primarily through its load balancing capabilities, helping us avoid traffic overload on individual servers and manage traffic effectively, and since moving to the R-series, I notice improved performance as it is user-friendly, handles traffic efficiently, and offers better CPU and memory for higher throughput with minimal downtime."
"The solution is very stable and scales easily."
"The most valuable feature I found is iRules."
"Routing and load balancing are its most valuable features."
 

Cons

"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."
"The tool must be simplified."
"I think the logging could be improved."
"Internet and cloud support could be improved."
"They need to improve the interface and some of the functionalities."
"The initial setup can be complex - it's quite flexible in terms of configuration, but the person configuring it needs to understand the application side, the network side, and the server."
"We would like to see load balancing between the cloud and the on-premise, a straightforward deployment feature."
"The user experience for dashboards and reports can be improved."
"We would like to have integration into encryption and PKI integration with SafeNet. That is probably the key component in using External PKIs, letting people bring their PKIs with them."
"It reaches a point where scaling is no longer possible."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"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 tool is cheap."
"It's not a cheap product, but there are no other replacements for what we do with it."
"F5 pricing is too high, compared to Citrix."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good. We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because everything that we needed was a soft appliance. We needed something to work in Amazon, and this product was available there."
"I am not aware of the exact cost of the product. However, it is expensive."
"BIG-IP LTM isn't a cheap solution - I'd rate its pricing as three out of five."
"It could be priced a little less, especially on the virtual side. It gets a bit expensive, but you get what you pay."
"Check other vendors like Cisco, Citrix or A10 Networks. There are plenty in the market with which you can achieve same thing."
"In my view, the cost is somewhat on the higher side. There are discounts available, but I wouldn't say it's overpriced. It's not cheap either, and the value for money is a bit higher from that perspective."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
11%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business62
Midsize Enterprise32
Large Enterprise86
 

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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP?
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) could improve file upload speeds when opening cases and attaching files; someti...
What is your primary use case for F5 BIG-IP?
My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is placing our applications on F5 and the backend servers ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
Airlock Suite
F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Raiffeisen, SGKB, Generali, Visana
Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Fortinet, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: April 2026.
893,915 professionals have used our research since 2012.