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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud comparison

 

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 Web Application ...
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
Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
23rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
CDN (11th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (19th), API Security (16th), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (9th)
 

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.
reviewer2812593 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Advanced threat protection has reduced financial risk and improves application security visibility
The issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the real-time analysis is not robust; I am unable to see all the logs of everything that happened, including what is passive. It only logs when there are suspicious activities, which means if something is not considered suspicious by Fortinet, I will not see the full picture. That is a disadvantage because it will not log unless it identifies an IOC or attacks, meaning I cannot see traffic information in a way that helps build more intelligence. The biggest issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the logging is not as extensive as I would prefer. For instance, if there was an issue two days ago and Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud did not mark it as a concern, I will not see any information about that, making it challenging to explain to customers if their request did not reach us. It hampers visibility from an API perspective. They need to enhance monitoring and logging to be more extensive and capture even passive activities. The AI integration in Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is still new. The generative models are good, but there is much work left to improve. It is not as intelligent as it could be; thus, enhancements around the AI co-assistant would be beneficial. Additionally, logging and monitoring need improvement as I can capture traffic and investigate offline on my Fortinet firewall, including full traffic view, but Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud currently focuses only on security concerns, which does not give the complete picture.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."
"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"We have seen a reduction in incidents and a good return on investment from Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud, with our return on investment around 60%."
"My favorite Fortinet device is the FortiGate next-gen firewall itself; it is a complete suite with intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, anti-malware, anti-DDoS, and SD-WAN functionalities."
 

Cons

"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 have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"Real-time traffic analysis has posed an issue for us because we did not see logs for legitimate traffic."
"The issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the real-time analysis is not robust; I am unable to see all the logs of everything that happened, including what is passive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"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."
"It is not too pricey."
"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."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
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%
Construction Company
30%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
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 have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much an...
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 every employee needs to check DNS requests and network traffic. We have strict ne...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
Real-time traffic analysis has posed an issue for us because we did not see logs for legitimate traffic. A separate license is needed for Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud to send logs to other cloud serv...
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is used as a WAF solution.
What advice do you have for others considering Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
We are a customer running Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud for both our organization and one for our customer. Three users use Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud. As administrators, it is easy to maintain. Using...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.