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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs F5 Rules for AWS WAF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Barracuda Web Application F...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (17th)
F5 Rules for AWS WAF
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Business Rules Management (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (29th)
 

Featured Reviews

HA
Owner at Hga consulting
Has helped manage client domains with streamlined access control and threat visibility
I don't know what areas could be improved with Cloudflare WAF; Cloudflare is constantly improving and adding features to their feature set. They're doing a good job, and as far as DNS and support for any domains that I create or my clients create, it's mandatory for me to make sure that they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider. The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service. It doesn't pay to try to host your own website.
Shahzad Abid - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Information Technology at College of Physicians & Surgeons Pakistan
Has protected our legacy applications effectively but has required constant manual filtering due to false positives
I assess the effectiveness of the machine learning-driven threat detection in Barracuda Web Application Firewall as sometimes behaving abnormally, often showing me false positive attacks, so I have to fix these attacks from time to time. From a stability point of view, I would definitely rate Barracuda Web Application Firewall a seven out of ten. There is definitely some room for improvement; nothing is perfect in the world. I am not satisfied with the technical support from Barracuda. I am somewhat disappointed with the technical support that I have received so far. Whenever I generate a ticket for my problem, it goes to the Indian support team, and they all the time start with the most junior team member, consuming all my precious time. At the end, I have to close that ticket without any satisfactory solution. I have complained that they should shift my support to any other region because I don't need Indian support; they are simply pathetic and not up to mark. To improve Barracuda Web Application Firewall, customers should be given ongoing training opportunities regarding the product and its features. I am not familiar with many features that are available, only using those which are necessary for my applications. I believe Barracuda must provide clearer product information or training sessions to make it more user-friendly, as sometimes its interface can be rigid and lacking in helpful resources or user tutorials about its features. For it to get closer to a ten, I think advanced reporting is missing because, as I mentioned earlier, there are many false positive events being recorded. Often, when I analyze these attacks, they turn out to be genuine customers or users interacting with my product, but Barracuda tags them as attackers. Reducing false positives must be a priority.
reviewer2783919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Managed security rules have protected our public e‑commerce sites and simplified ongoing defense
I advise anyone looking for a great tool to secure their public-facing applications to start using F5 Rules for AWS WAF. These are managed rule sets, so you do not need to worry about continuous improvements or ensuring your application is secure; F5 Rules for AWS WAF will take care of that and is always making the necessary improvements in these rule sets to ensure security. I am very impressed with the rule sets and the continuous engineering from their security team to ensure the required rule set availability. I really appreciate the fantastic job they are doing. F5 Rules for AWS WAF can be integrated with AWS CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, Lambda, and API Gateway. I am satisfied with all these services as they are our intermediary points for services exposed to the public or globally. I gave this product a rating of ten out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"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 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."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"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."
"Our customers value the solution's simplicity."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to set up."
"The product's advanced bot and threat protection capabilities are valuable."
"It allows us to scale out to multiple phase servers."
"The volumetric DDoS defense is very good because I had a problem with a lot of volumetric DDoS attacks on my servers. After using Barracuda, those attacks have stopped and all the traffic is going smoothly to my servers and the system is working really well."
"We only need one subscription to be protected against both active DDoS and offline DDoS attacks."
"It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs in our environment."
"The updating and signature features are my primary use case for the solution. These features are beneficial to my organization."
"F5 Rules for AWS WAF has positively impacted our organization for security through the implementation of traffic rules in our application."
"I advise anyone looking for a great tool to secure their public-facing applications to start using F5 Rules for AWS WAF."
"I advise anyone looking for a great tool to secure their public-facing applications to start using F5 Rules for AWS WAF."
 

Cons

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"DNS Management."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"The pricing could be improved."
"I would like to see an improved capacity to store logs so that they will be available for a longer time."
"There are issues when upgrading firewalls and we experience different issues across customers."
"Barracuda Web Application Firewall’s scalability needs improvement."
"Barracuda Web Application Firewall lacks some of the more specified and structured features offered by solutions like Tenable."
"One of Barracuda's limitations is its user interface. The GUI for configuration is not intuitive and has remained largely unchanged for the past 10 to 12 years."
"I think the main area for improvement in this product is learning it, as can be seen when comparing it to the F5 web application firewall. F5 has a very powerful learning phase when you start using your web application firewall against your site. Barracuda has something like this, but not with the same functionality from my point of view."
"Sometimes when we put it in action, we have some blogs that appear as false positives. I think that it's improving. Barracuda should minimize false positives."
"We've had some blocks of the application and some false positives."
"An area for improvement I see is that while everything is in good shape, I demand continuous improvisation of these rule sets."
"It's too early to talk about a return on investment with F5 Rules for AWS WAF."
"An area for improvement I see is that while everything is in good shape, I demand continuous improvisation of these rule sets."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"We are using the free version."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"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 cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The price is reasonable."
"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."
"The product is expensive."
"Cost is a bit on the higher side. Big companies can afford it."
"The price of this solution is okay."
"The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is quite expensive."
"The product is inexpensive."
"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."
"For small companies, the price is very expensive because the WAF is an enterprise-level application, not intended for smaller businesses. In my opinion, the price is right for enterprise-level use."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise11
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 do you like most about Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
I am not using the API protection feature right now because I don't host any APIs through Barracuda Web Application F...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
At the time I was acquiring Barracuda Web Application Firewall, I found it costly compared to other products. To over...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
From the pricing perspective, I found it to be comparable to other marketplace rules available in AWS Marketplace. It...
What needs improvement with F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
An area for improvement I see is that while everything is in good shape, I demand continuous improvisation of these r...
What is your primary use case for F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
We are providing support to our end customers who have e-commerce websites that need to be exposed to the public, and...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
No data available
 

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.
Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. F5 Rules for AWS WAF and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.