Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs NGINX App Protect comparison

Barracuda Networks and F5 are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #32 with an average rating of 6.0, while F5 is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.7. Additionally, 75% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

NGINX App Protect and Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service are competitors in the web application firewall market. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service seems to have an edge in terms of feature set, while NGINX App Protect is often preferred for its pricing and customer service.

Features: NGINX App Protect offers seamless integration with NGINX environments, effective DDoS protection, and comprehensive command-line management. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service provides comprehensive threat intelligence, real-time attack detection, and robust threat prevention capabilities tailored to extensive security needs.

Room for Improvement: NGINX App Protect could enhance deployment simplicity, expand integration beyond NGINX, and include broader threat intelligence features. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service might improve cost efficiency, offer better customization for smaller infrastructures, and streamline its user interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NGINX App Protect may require more technical expertise upfront but offers strong support for NGINX platforms, coupled with responsive customer service. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service facilitates easier deployment with minimal infrastructure changes and delivers commendable customer service.

Pricing and ROI: NGINX App Protect is noted for competitive pricing and attractive ROI, especially when integrated with existing NGINX setups, offering reduced additional expenditure. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, despite being perceived as more expensive, offers significant return on investment through its extensive security features, which can justify the cost for comprehensive security needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NGINX App Protect Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NGINX App Protect

April 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Hadar Eshel

Co-Founder and CEO at Cloudway

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.…

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Saurav Kumar

Senior security architecture at National Payment Corporation Of India

Offers protection to users from external threats

NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"The tool is user-friendly."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"It's very user-friendly."

More Cloudflare pros

"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"

"It provides an ease of policy management."

"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."

"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."

"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."

"I tested specific features and evaluated the solution against the Web Application Firewall. I conducted research to test different detection percentages. I did not use it directly for protection but for evaluation purposes."

"The stability of the product is very impressive since it handles 60,000 to 70,000 requests or transactions per second."

"Overall, I rate NGINX App Protect between eight and nine."

"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its flexibility."

"The most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found."

"It is a stable solution."

"The policies are flexible based on the technologies you use."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"Support response time could be improved."

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"Latencies are always a problem."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

"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."

"As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment."

"Its technical support could be better."

"It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput."

"Right now, the tool doesn't provide an option revolving around update feeds, specifically the signature update option in the UI."

"Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks."

"It doesn't have more advanced features like no false-positive security, which you can configure in Advanced WAF."

"The integration of NGINX App Protect could improve."

"The price of NGINX App Protect could improve."

More NGINX App Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"The price is reasonable."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."

"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"NGINX is not expensive."

"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."

"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."

"NGINX App Protect is expensive."

"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

20%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

Retailer

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

It provides an ease of policy management.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX App Protect?

It's very easy to deploy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?

I don't know the pricing yet because in my other project, I was not part of the buying side and I was just starting t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requir...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 87% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 13% of the time

More Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 22% of the time

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 18% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 15% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 8% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

Download Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

April 2025

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Barracuda WAF as a Service

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“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. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“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.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is a comprehensive solution designed to provide application security, DDoS protection, SSL authentication, protocol support, and application delivery. It is a plug-and-play solution with automated policies, simple configuration, and easy rule creation.

The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system based on email protection with cloud security. It is also a web application firewall and covers major protection and threat management functions. With Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, customers can ensure the security of their web code and comply with global IT policies.

Barracuda Networks

NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
Complying with security and regulatory requirements

NGINX App Protect offers:

Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security

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

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Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NGINX App Protect

April 2025

Free Report: Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NGINX App Protect

Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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