F5 Advanced WAF and Azure Front Door compete in the web application firewall category, focusing on security and threat mitigation. F5 Advanced WAF seems to have the upper hand with its detailed security features and granular control over policies, offering advanced threat detection and mitigation options.
Features: F5 Advanced WAF provides an extensive suite of security features, including IP intelligence, DDoS protection, and behavior analysis, which are valuable for detecting and mitigating a wide array of threats. It also offers customizable security policies and granular control for targeted protection. Azure Front Door delivers key capabilities such as bot protection, application firewall, and seamless global resource deployment, noted for its integration within Azure's ecosystem and efficiency in threat management.
Room for Improvement: F5 Advanced WAF users often note the complexity of the platform and suggest that simplification would enhance user experience. Better integration of logging and reporting and the need for bundled functionality like APM are highlighted as areas for improvement. Azure Front Door users see a need for clearer cost structures and better differentiation among its offerings, with improved support for multi-cloud environments and more streamlined features.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 Advanced WAF typically requires a complex on-premises or hybrid cloud setup, needing detailed configuration and skilled personnel. It is supported by generally responsive customer service, though some users experience delays. Azure Front Door benefits from Microsoft's robust cloud infrastructure, offering straightforward deployment. It is primarily utilized in public cloud settings, and its global presence ensures rapid resolution of issues, meeting enterprise needs effectively.
Pricing and ROI: F5 Advanced WAF is known for its high price point, often justified by its extensive feature set and high ROI through enhanced protection and operational efficiency. It offers various licensing plans, which can be expensive for some users. Azure Front Door operates on a flexible pay-as-you-go model, attractive for scaling needs. While some users find the premium tiers costly, the value is perceived as favorable due to integrated features and ROI achieved through improved security and service availability.
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.
Azure Front Door offers a quick return on investment once it is set up.
Time savings in daily operations come from the automatic learning and signature update reducing the need for constant manual rule management, allowing the security and network teams to spend significantly less time handling false positive application-related escalations.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to contact them.
The technical support of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between five and seven at maximum.
I am able to set up a critical call with Microsoft, and they respond quickly to tickets with the highest severity.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
F5 Advanced WAF provides the insights and notifications I need in terms of reporting and alerting.
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
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.
I find that Front Door can become expensive for large-scale projects with more transactions and users.
I consider the scalability of Azure Front Door to be strong.
I can run it in HA mode or even divide the traffic volume to the number of instances that I have based on their resource sizing.
The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10.
I rate Azure Front Door's stability a nine because it is easy to make updates through Azure Portal.
F5 Advanced WAF has been very reliable and consistent for us; in our on-premise enterprise setup, it has been stable and predictable in day-to-day operations without any unexpected crashes or WAF-related downtime in production.
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available.
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.
They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long.
If I could use Azure Front Door with private IP addresses, it would be more beneficial.
It relies on the WAF module where users must configure rate-limiting rules, as it does not automatically sense malicious spikes in traffic.
The only significant adjustment required is with URL set parameters that need to be passed for an existing domain.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
Overall, these are not blockers, merely enhancement opportunities, and once tuned, F5 Advanced WAF is very stable and reliable; improving usability, reporting, and onboarding would make it even more effective for larger environments.
There is excellent clarity in the LTM and the WAF.
Azure Front Door is cheaper for small projects, companies, or applications compared to using separate tools.
Licensing is capacity-driven, so you need careful planning based on traffic volume and use cases, and adding features such as Bot Protection impacts costs; once licensing is clear and sized correctly, there are no surprises.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
The custom rules and the geo-redundant geographical rule feature, which allows me to implement geographical rules for customers, add significant value.
The best features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall are multiple, including the WAF, rate limiter, and bot attack protection.
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.
Azure Front Door provides DDoS protection and features related to WAF.
Azure Front Door includes a built-in web application firewall, which performs signature-based checks of the request payload, offering protection against common attacks or malicious requests.
The Advanced Attack Signature database is very strong and regularly updated, effectively blocking SQL injections, cross-site scripting, command injections, and file inclusion attacks while allowing selective enabling or disabling of signatures to avoid blocking genuine traffic.
F5 Advanced WAF offers the best features that are capable of stopping any type of attack, and it is a really reliable and stable product that you can rely on to stop any type of attack.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 Advanced WAF | 7.5% |
| Cloudflare Web Application Firewall | 5.6% |
| Azure Front Door | 3.5% |
| Other | 83.4% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 6 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 9 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 9 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 26 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.
Azure Front Door enhances web application performance and security by leveraging traffic inspection, SSL offloading, and a web application firewall. It enables intelligent routing, load balancing, and global resource deployment while providing essential features for online application security.
Azure Front Door integrates GitOps for seamless deployment, offering significant capabilities in giant networks like CDN functionalities and DDoS protection. Its advanced configurations include traffic analytics and transit layer security. Despite its affordability and scalability, users see room for improvement in global load balancing and private IP address support, citing integration challenges with other cloud vendors. The interface may appear complex, and some users desire more transparent pricing, better DDoS defenses, and enhanced monitoring. This platform is especially beneficial for securing external traffic and optimizing content delivery, providing DNS integration and disaster recovery mechanisms.
What are the key features of Azure Front Door?In industries focusing on online presence and global user engagement, Azure Front Door is invaluable for optimizing web application performance. E-commerce platforms deploy it to secure transactions and enhance load times. Media companies leverage its CDN and security features to ensure seamless content delivery. Enterprises with international operations find it crucial for reliable and secure data access across regions.
F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.
F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.
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