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Airlock 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Airlock
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
40th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
9.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NGINX App Protect
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
17th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (29th), API Security (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Airlock is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX App Protect is 2.1%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NGINX App Protect2.1%
Airlock0.8%
Other97.1%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product."
"NGINX App Protect's best features are auto-learning, which creates a profile of applications that are deployed, bot protection, and force protection, which lets you configure your brute force policy and alert for and prevent brute force attacks."
"I would say that 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."
"The policies are flexible based on the technologies you use."
"The solution has helped us greatly during this Covid period."
"The initial setup was simple and took three to four days."
"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."
"NGINX App Protect has positively impacted my organization by adding an additional layer of security on top of my infrastructure layer, which I consider quite helpful."
"The tool is not complex and is very user-friendly."
 

Cons

"The tool must be simplified."
"The configuration needs to be more flexible because it is difficult to do things that are outside of the ordinary."
"The solution needs to be improved in the e-commerce portal."
"I think NGINX App Protect could be improved by having it come out of the box with NGINX."
"The setup of NGINX App Protect is complex. The full process took one week to complete. Additionally, we had to change the network infrastructure platform which took one month."
"They could provide a better user interface."
"The support from NGINX App Protect is too expensive."
"The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model is also not good."
"This solution is not really scalable. Both the virtual appliance and the physical appliance are limited in terms of how much traffic they can handle."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cheap."
"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."
"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."
"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."
"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."
"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."
"NGINX is not expensive."
"There are no additional fees."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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 something different handles that in my team.
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 the POC for the customer, and he by mistake installed the Instance Manager on the ...
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 telecom, and for anyone that has their own database or servers that they host we...
 

Also Known As

Airlock Suite
NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Raiffeisen, SGKB, Generali, Visana
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Radware, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: November 2026.
921,338 professionals have used our research since 2012.