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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)
7th
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)
41st
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
CDN (33rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (37th), API Security (33rd), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (15th)
 

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.
Mohamed Fouad - PeerSpot reviewer
Cybersecurity Team Leader at EMAK For Computer Manufacturing (ECM)
Web protection has improved security posture and prevents advanced bot and zero-day attacks
In my opinion, the best features of Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud are usability and price, which are the two strongest features from Fortinet security products. We use the advanced bot mitigation, which supports credential stuffing, account takeover prevention, and stopping layer 7 DDoS and OWASP Top 10 attacks. With the bot mitigation in Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud, we control end users whenever they connect to our website, checking that they are not bots and allowing access only after verification. We run AI detection in a testing phase, using both basic and advanced security measures, including API security and XML protection. AI helps by providing machine learning that suggests which policies need tuning and which signatures need to be added to our policy. Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud's adaptability to traffic patterns helps mitigate zero-day vulnerabilities through machine learning. Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud helps our organization by relying on Fortinet threat intelligence, which provides information on newly emerging zero-day attacks, allowing us to run signatures to stop these attacks. We utilize the dynamic learning capabilities for threat updates.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"It is configurable via API."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"The impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."
"We have seen a reduction in incidents and a good return on investment from Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud, with our return on investment around 60%."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"Real-time traffic analysis has posed an issue for us because we did not see logs for legitimate traffic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"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 is expensive."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
No data available
 

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...
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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 Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.