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Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall 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)
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (33rd)
Cloudflare Web Application ...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th)
 

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.
Hadar Eshel - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to install platform with valuable policy management features
We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy. Additionally, it could operate in a local data center.…
SachidDoshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a huge signature repository and is superiorly effective in mitigating DDoS attacks
The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced, which presently stands at two or three months. The product has a custom rule set that users can modify and manifest as needed. The vendor can probably shorten the learning curve using cutting-edge technologies like AI. The solution provider can also work around the web applications and identify the toolset that needs to be implemented to deploy the solution in less time. The vendor has launched a SASE product that can function with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, but many improvements are needed in terms of features, such as the web filtering feature, and CASB has not yet been added.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"It's very user-friendly."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The most valuable features of the solution are it is plug and play, has automated policies, a simple configuration, and is easy to create rules."
"I like its ability to identify known attacks, including DDOS attacks. It's valuable because software must be able to stop known attacks. Application attacks are evolving all the time. When it comes to software-as-a-service, we need to have software that knows about all the latest attacks. It should also protect against major unknown attacks."
"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."
"It provides an ease of policy management."
"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."
"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."
 

Cons

"Support response time could be improved."
"Eventually, things go sideways and require fixes when it would have been easier to prevent the issue initially."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"The solution can improve by bundling Security Operation Center (SOC) with the WAF-as-a-Service, it would provide a lot more value to customers."
"We found it a bit slow when accessing it through the web browser. The URL also exposed the user name and the hashed password. When I log into my Barracuda WAF user portal, I could see the username and the hashed password on the URL itself. So, it is not very secure, and it is important to take that off."
"One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy."
"The stability of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"It's a very specific solution that is only requested for a customer's web code or their global IT policy."
"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"Support can be challenging at times."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The price is reasonable."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The product is expensive but it offers flexible pricing. It could be affordable."
"It's very difficult for me to give an estimate of the cost. All I know is that we sell the box itself as a service."
"I rate the product's price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high. There are no additional costs to be paid apart from the standard licensing fees attached to the solution."
"It is not too pricey."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"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."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The solution is expensive."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
15%
Media Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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 needs improvement with Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strateg...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals.
What do you like most about Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
The product has a valuable security control functionality.
What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I cannot say much about areas of improvement for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall because I haven't gone through d...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Barracuda WAF as a Service
Cloudflare WAF
 

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.
Salvation Army
crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. Cloudflare Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,901 professionals have used our research since 2012.