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AWS WAF vs Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud comparison

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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 ...
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Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
41st
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
CDN (33rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (37th), API Security (33rd), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (15th)
 

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.
Azam S M - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC
Has successfully filtered malicious traffic and allowed country-specific access controls
For improvement in AWS WAF, we can have better monitoring. One of the things that should be improved in AWS WAF is the monitoring; we need to identify the requests and where they are coming from. If it's a bot, we should differentiate the requests, whether they are automated or not. The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information. We also need a feature where we can filter specific requests. If there are scripts in the requests, we should be able to filter those requests to see if there are any scripts running from them.
reviewer2812593 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Advanced threat protection has reduced financial risk and improves application security visibility
The issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the real-time analysis is not robust; I am unable to see all the logs of everything that happened, including what is passive. It only logs when there are suspicious activities, which means if something is not considered suspicious by Fortinet, I will not see the full picture. That is a disadvantage because it will not log unless it identifies an IOC or attacks, meaning I cannot see traffic information in a way that helps build more intelligence. The biggest issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the logging is not as extensive as I would prefer. For instance, if there was an issue two days ago and Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud did not mark it as a concern, I will not see any information about that, making it challenging to explain to customers if their request did not reach us. It hampers visibility from an API perspective. They need to enhance monitoring and logging to be more extensive and capture even passive activities. The AI integration in Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is still new. The generative models are good, but there is much work left to improve. It is not as intelligent as it could be; thus, enhancements around the AI co-assistant would be beneficial. Additionally, logging and monitoring need improvement as I can capture traffic and investigate offline on my Fortinet firewall, including full traffic view, but Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud currently focuses only on security concerns, which does not give the complete picture.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"I have not had any issues with this solution, and I would recommend it to others who are interested in using it."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"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."
"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."
"The performance is excellent."
"AWS WAF helps mitigate different kinds of bot attacks and SQL injection that happen within the retail industry."
"We do have a lot of external applications which are exposed to the internet and WAF provides protection for them."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to limit access based on geographical location by restricting specific IP addresses."
"The biggest benefit of AWS WAF for us is to filter malicious requests, so we can protect our environment and application from malicious actors."
"AWS is very user-friendly and largely inexpensive, however, if an organization has the budget, there are lots of great products out there that do largely the same thing."
"As a basic WAF, it's better than nothing. So if you need something simple out of the box with default features, AWS WAF is good."
"The agility is great for us in terms of cloud services in general."
"My favorite Fortinet device is the FortiGate next-gen firewall itself; it is a complete suite with intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, anti-malware, anti-DDoS, and SD-WAN functionalities."
"We have seen a reduction in incidents and a good return on investment from Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud, with our return on investment around 60%."
 

Cons

"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."
"The reporting could be more granular."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"We should be able to do proper whitelisting."
"However, it'll be better for us if we could have some more documented guidelines on how the specific business should be structured and the roles that the cloud recommends."
"An improvement area would be that it's more of a manual effort when you have to enable rules. That's one of the downsides. If that can be done in an automated way, it would be great. That's a lagging feature currently."
"We need more support as we go global."
"The cost management has room for improvement."
"In a future release I would like to see automation. There's no interaction between the applications and that makes it tedious. We have to do the preparation all over again for each of our other applications."
"I find the documentation somewhat complex to implement during the initial stages."
"The pricing model is complicated."
"The issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the real-time analysis is not robust; I am unable to see all the logs of everything that happened, including what is passive."
"Real-time traffic analysis has posed an issue for us because we did not see logs for legitimate traffic."
 

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."
"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."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"It is not too pricey."
"The solution is expensive."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is high price, and ten is low price"
"The price of AWS WAF is reasonable, it is not expensive and it is not cheap."
"I would rate AWS WAF's pricing a seven out of ten."
"We are kind of doing a POC comparison to see what works best. Pricing-wise, AWS is one of the most attractive ones. It is fairly cheap, and we like the pricing part. We're trying to see what makes more sense operation-wise, license-wise, and pricing-wise."
"There are different scale options available for WAF."
"It has a variable pricing scheme."
"The product’s pricing is reasonable."
"AWS WAF is pay-as-you-go, I only pay for what I'm using. There is no subscription or any payment upfront, I can terminate use at any time. Which is an advantage."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Construction Company
32%
Healthcare Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

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 Business22
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise26
No data available
 

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 are the limitations of AWS WAF vs alternative WAFs?
Hi Varun, I have had experienced with several WAF deployments and deep technical assessments of the following: 1. Im...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What do you like most about AWS WAF?
The most valuable feature of AWS WAF is its highly configurable rules system.
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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
AWS Web Application Firewall
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
eVitamins, 9Splay, Senao International
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.