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Azure Front Door vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
Azure Front Door
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
CDN (2nd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th), Microsoft Security Suite (18th)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (30th)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Renato Roque - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless global application delivery with features like efficient load balancing, web application firewall and robust traffic routing capabilities
I find the WAF policy to be exceptionally valuable as it adds a layer of security protection to our applications. I particularly appreciate its load-balancing capabilities as it allows us to manage multiple instances and support a global presence effectively. From a performance standpoint, users can connect to the Front Door, and the load balancer directs them to the nearest origin location. This aspect has been a key factor in enhancing our user experience with Azure Front Door, making it a scalable solution that positively impacts performance.
Shashank N - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good stability, but the agent-based approach could be more convenient
The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF. Additionally, the agent-based approach presents challenges with managing agents across versions and dependencies on specific application platforms like Apache or NGINX, leading to compatibility issues and complexity in integration. This agent-based system proved particularly difficult to manage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"It's a great product because it's scalable, has great coverage, and is mature with good defenses against DDoS attacks."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Has a great application firewall and we like the security."
"I find the technical support excellent, and I rate it a ten."
"Rules Engine is a valuable feature."
"The web application firewall is a great feature."
"I am impressed with the tool's integrations."
"You can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."
"It inspects the traffic at the network level before it comes into Azure. We can do SSL offloading, and it can detect abnormalities before the traffic comes into the application. It can be used globally and is easy to set up. It is also quite stable and scalable."
"Azure Front Door's advanced routing rules for traffic management are highly effective, allowing you to configure HTTP tags, change different header or header response values, configure origin domains, and add security to your Layer 7 using these routing rules."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
"Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate."
 

Cons

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"The pricing could be improved."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"My suggestion for improvement would be to enhance the Data Export feature to include specific tables, particularly the Azure Diagnostics table."
"There could be improvements regarding its pricing for large-scale projects."
"In the tool, there needs to be a good amount of monitoring in the area of health probes to capture in front of what is happening."
"The user interface needs improvement as it is difficult to create the mapping to link the problem with your private address sources."
"It lacks sufficient functionality."
"I dislike the URL set parameters."
"The product needs to improve its latency."
"There's a limitation on the amount of global rules we can add."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
"The UI is not very intuitive and could be better."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"We are using the free version."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The price is reasonable."
"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"Considering the standard licensing of the tool, even though we have not checked the billing as of now, it might not be very costly."
"The product is expensive."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"The product has an affordable cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Front Door?
I am not sure about the pricing but believe Azure Front Door might require a higher cost due to its entry point nature.
What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?
The pricing is very competitive compared to other providers. The pricing is definitely a factor in our decision-makin...
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
We do use it, but the UI can be improved as we mostly work through the CI/CD. It provides support, but sometimes it i...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Azure Front-Door
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
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Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Front Door vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.