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Atomic ModSecurity Rules vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall 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

Atomic ModSecurity Rules
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
29th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudflare Web Application ...
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
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Atomic ModSecurity Rules is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 3.6%, down from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall3.6%
Atomic ModSecurity Rules0.8%
Other95.6%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Vahid Babaey - PeerSpot reviewer
PhD Student at University of North Carolina at Charlott
Open rules have enabled me to secure web apps against obfuscated SQL injection and XSS attacks
The best feature Atomic ModSecurity Rules offers is the open source aspect. I believe that because it's open source, all of the developers, programmers, and security experts are able to update this WAF and provide more rules, creating a more secure WAF for all of the clients and customers around the world. By accessing Atomic ModSecurity Rules, it has helped me significantly. Because of this open source feature, I am able to generate new rules and update the WAF and use this WAF in my research and also give it to other clients and customers to use the updated WAF. All of this is done just because of the open-source feature, because it can be updated.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best feature Atomic ModSecurity Rules offers is the open source aspect, because all of the developers, programmers, and security experts are able to update this WAF and provide more rules, creating a more secure WAF for all of the clients and customers around the world."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."
"For us, the key feature of Cloudflare is DDoS protection and IP hiding, especially since we are a crypto company."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"I have not had any issues with this solution, and I would recommend it to others who are interested in using it."
"It is configurable via API."
 

Cons

"Additionally, I know that ModSecurity can block only SQL injection and XSS attacks, no more types of attacks."
"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."
"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is not too pricey."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
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916,240 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
29%
Hospitality Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Atomic ModSecurity Rules?
Atomic ModSecurity Rules can be improved by first studying and reading the structure of new obfuscated attacks, then trying to generate more specific and better rules to block these attacks, and th...
What is your primary use case for Atomic ModSecurity Rules?
My main use case for Atomic ModSecurity Rules is in my research, which tries to make websites secure against web attacks like SQL injection and XSS attacks. On one side, I try to generate some obfu...
What advice do you have for others considering Atomic ModSecurity Rules?
I would rate Atomic ModSecurity Rules nine out of ten. I chose nine out of ten because I have not studied other WAFs. I know that ModSecurity is the only open source WAF, but I believe that the oth...
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 have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much an...
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 every employee needs to check DNS requests and network traffic. We have strict ne...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare WAF
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Radware, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: October 2026.
916,240 professionals have used our research since 2012.