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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Symantec 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 Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Barracuda Web Application F...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
17th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Symantec Web Application Fi...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
29th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda Web Application Firewall is 1.9%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Web Application Firewall is 0.8%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.7%
Barracuda Web Application Firewall1.9%
Symantec Web Application Firewall0.8%
Other92.6%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
CTO at PlayNirvana
Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.
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.
Vatsal Mehta - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Co-Founder & CEO at HEDEHI Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Boosts Security Measures with Easy Deployment and Implementation
Regarding areas for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall, I think they can enhance the features they currently focus on, as there are various types of web applications, and it would be great if they could develop features to cater to all these types. For example, a feature to scan for unauthorized plugins or extensions could let us know if those extensions are authorized, unauthorized, or malicious. There's room for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall by introducing AI into their dashboard so that we can query the dashboard and fetch data insights, similar to querying ChatGPT for answers. They currently have this feature but can make improvements for better querying to get insights.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."
"It is configurable via API."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."
"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides optimized performance, a user-friendly environment, helpful dashboards, and is simple to use."
"Some of the most valuable features are the ease of deployment, the Barracuda support, the easy-to-use console, and the granularity of the reports."
"This product gives us visibility into what is going on in two servers, including connections and sessions, real-time alerts, very good reporting, and KPIs. It makes managing security of a critical server very easy, with a friendly GUI."
"The installation is straightforward."
"It allows us to scale out to multiple phase servers."
"The solution ensures layer seven is secure from attacks."
"One of the best aspects of the solution is the support provided."
"Even when we were upgrading to a new OS, we didn't have any difficulties with the product. The stability is good."
"The best feature of Symantec Web Application Firewall is that it is very easy to use, and the deployment and implementation processes are really easy."
"The best feature of Symantec Web Application Firewall is that it is very easy to use, and the deployment and implementation processes are really easy."
"It provides us with a sense of security."
"The setup was straightforward."
"The setup was straightforward."
"This product is doing what it should and what we are expecting from it."
"The solution has an up-to-date data repository to deal with external threats."
"The interface is user-friendly."
 

Cons

"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"It is not stable nor mature, though it is not a problem for us."
"I faced an issue when Barracuda decided not to support Azure Stack Hub anymore, which was a significant issue as we had many customers using it on that platform."
"If you know nothing about networks, then you can't set it up."
"The areas where it could be better are in security profiles, where a single service can have only one policy; there is no feature to add multiple security policies for separate endpoints within the same application, and the traffic manager is not flexible enough to handle unusual traffic patterns, sometimes leading to crashes."
"I have found F5 more stable than Barracuda Web Application Firewall. They should improve the stability."
"In the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, there should be more affordable options for WAF as a service."
"While the UI is good, it can get a little bit complicated."
"We've had some blocks of the application and some false positives."
"There's room for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall by introducing AI into their dashboard so that we can query the dashboard and fetch data insights, similar to querying ChatGPT for answers."
"Sometimes scanning slows down the endpoints."
"I'm not convinced that it's necessary the best solution going forward in the future."
"It would be an improvement if the management dashboards were not reliant upon Java."
"One of our issues is that sometimes scanning slows down the endpoints."
"There's room for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall by introducing AI into their dashboard so that we can query the dashboard and fetch data insights, similar to querying ChatGPT for answers."
"On a scale from one to 10, I would give it a five. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily the best solution going forward in the future."
"It would be an improvement if the management dashboards were not reliant upon Java."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The solution is expensive."
"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."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"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."
"The pricing is less compared to other web applications."
"The price of this solution is okay."
"They only offer a yearly licensing plan."
"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."
"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."
"Cost is a bit on the higher side. Big companies can afford it."
"The product is inexpensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise11
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
I have been working with Barracuda Web Application Firewall for more than almost three and a half years. Its main use...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Barracuda Web Application Firewall are reasonable. They are competitive wh...
What needs improvement with Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
The areas where it could be better are in security profiles, where a single service can have only one policy. There i...
What needs improvement with Symantec Web Application Firewall?
Regarding areas for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall, I think they can enhance the features they curr...
What is your primary use case for Symantec Web Application Firewall?
Our use case for Symantec Web Application Firewall is primarily for security purposes as we develop web application s...
What advice do you have for others considering Symantec Web Application Firewall?
I would recommend Symantec Web Application Firewall to other users due to all the benefits I mentioned earlier, such ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
Symantec WAF, Blue Coat Protecting Web Applications
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
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. Symantec Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.