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Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway 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
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
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) (34th)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
 

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.…
DevenderVannela - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensures efficient traffic management and robust security while simplifying complex configurations
The best features for Microsoft Azure Application Gateway basically protect your application and provide security-related features and also divert the traffic to different instances of your application. I have used URL-based routing, which helps manage traffic efficiency. It is a bit hard to manage in the long run, but it does provide value. I have used the gateway's Web Application Firewall feature, which enhances security as it is the first entry point to your network from the outside world. It helps protect against unwanted requests and other threats that can be configured. Regarding the integration with Azure Active Directory, it helps with authentication processes to configure all the users or the groups. The monitoring capabilities on Azure provide insight into application performance and potential threats because monitoring comes with many products. On Azure, you have Azure Monitor itself to help you monitor the application by collecting data. You have Application Insights and the logging workspace on Azure. By combining these three, you can implement monitoring solutions on Azure applications. Auto-scaling is important because it helps in resource management for customers. Scaling is one of the key features of moving to cloud for any customer. During peak times or special events, such as retail site promotions, user load increases significantly. To address this, based on the number of incoming requests or server capacities such as CPU and memory, you can automatically identify these peak scenarios and configure either scaling up or down automatically based on certain parameters.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"It's a great product because it's scalable, has great coverage, and is mature with good defenses against DDoS attacks."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"Cloudflare makes it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple users and multiple clients, and basically go in and access their account, make the changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."
"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"
"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."
"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."
"It provides an ease of policy management."
"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."
"Load balancing and web application firewall features are the most valuable."
"The production is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway are the policies, the data store they are using, and the cloud platform it operates on."
"I find Application Gateway’s WAF module valuable because it helps prevent layer 7 attacks."
"The solution provides great automation and it is easy to upgrade service."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway impacts our cost savings while maintaining higher performance."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the web application firewall (WAF)."
"Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well."
 

Cons

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"Technical support is lacking."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"It's a very specific solution that is only requested for a customer's web code or their global IT policy."
"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 solution can improve by bundling Security Operation Center (SOC) with the WAF-as-a-Service, it would provide a lot more value to customers."
"The stability of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The product could be easier to use and implement."
"It does not have the flexibility for using public IPs in version 2."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway could improve by allowing features to use more third-party tools."
"It could be more stable, and support could be better. It would also be better if they offered more features. For example, it lacks security features. Before we used another English solution, and we realized that some of the rules were not set up correctly and passed through the Application Gateway's English controllers. But the problem, in this case, is if you send ten rules, for example, six rules hit some issues. IP address blocking could be better. The rules, for example, don't work properly. If you have one issue, one rule or another rule will not work. This sounds like total madness to me."
"Scalability can be an issue."
"One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS."
"It takes a lot of time for a certificate to update in the system. That is a huge drawback, affecting the load-balancing side. And when there are changes to the load balancing, it affects the end-user."
"The solution has many limitations. You cannot upgrade the VPN to the application gateway. So I started with version one, which has limited capabilities, and they provided version two. And unfortunately, I cannot upgrade from v one to v two like other services. So I have to decommission the version one and create a new one with version two. Also the version one was complex with the certificates uploading the SQL certificates."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We are using the free version."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"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."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The price is reasonable."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"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."
"The product is expensive but it offers flexible pricing. It could be affordable."
"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."
"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."
"The solution is fairly priced."
"The solution's pricing is not complex. It is not expensive from our point of view."
"Every solution comes with a license and cost. Microsoft provides the license and the total cost is for the maintenance every year."
"I would rate the pricing a three out of ten, with ten being cheap and one being expensive."
"The cost is not an issue."
"The pricing is based on how much you use the solution."
"The solution is cheaper than Imperva. I rate it four to five out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Media Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise23
 

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'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...
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 Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Barracuda WAF as a Service
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
 

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
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
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