Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Radware Alteon comparison

Cloudflare and Radware are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Cloudflare is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Radware is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.9. Additionally, 95% of Cloudflare users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Radware users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Radware Alteon and Cloudflare Web Application Firewall compete in the application security and delivery category. Cloudflare seems to have an advantage due to its straightforward setup and cloud integration capabilities.

Features: Radware Alteon offers notable features like load balancing, SSL offloading, and application protection. Cloudflare is recognized for its OWASP rulesets, managed rules, and comprehensive DDoS protection.

Room for Improvement: Radware Alteon needs enhancements in automation and user-friendliness, and it faces issues with false positives. Cloudflare requires better documentation and improved pricing transparency for enterprise clients along with more refined rule management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Radware Alteon excels in on-premises and hybrid setups, backed by responsive but occasionally challenged technical support. Cloudflare is known for its quick response times and helpful support teams in cloud deployments.

Pricing and ROI: Radware Alteon offers competitive pricing with long-term cost-effectiveness and flexible licensing for significant ROI. Cloudflare's subscription model provides cost-effective solutions with usage-based pricing, offering good value and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Radware Alteon Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Radware Alteon

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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SachidDoshi

Senior Enterprise Security Architect at HGS - Hinduja Global Solutions

Offers a huge signature repository and is superiorly effective in mitigating DDoS attacks

The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced, which presently stands at two or three months. The product has a custom rule set that users can modify and manifest as needed. The vendor can probably shorten the learning curve using cutting-edge technologies like AI. The solution provider can also work around the web applications and identify the toolset that needs to be implemented to deploy the solution in less time. The vendor has launched a SASE product that can function with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, but many improvements are needed in terms of features, such as the web filtering feature, and CASB has not yet been added.

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MaverickHurley

Sr network arch at Mohawk Industries

Makes it easier and quicker to spin up services when we deploy applications

The most valuable aspect is the ability to customize the types of load-balancing scenarios needed for customized applications. Some of the load balancers on the market today are strictly out-of-hand load balancers for SSL or HTTP. Radware Alteon is most useful for customizing in-house applications based on ports and protocols. Another great feature is integrated application protection. There are many features you can activate. Some of them are add-ons, such as WAF protection, DDoS, rate-limiting, and connections-per-second per application. We also use Radware where we do all the programming.

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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 DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."

"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."

"It's very user-friendly."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

More Cloudflare pros

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."

"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

"The initial setup process is simple."

"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."

"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The simplicity of the GUI is what I like the most about Radware Alteon."

"Provides good performance and scalability."

"I like how easy it is to create policies in Alteon. Debugging and SSL offloading are also simple, and the global load-balancing part is good. Load-balancing and SSL offloading are the two features that ensure your virtual services work perfectly."

"The integrated application protection provided by Alteon is very good. It really helps to avoid false positives in some cases. It provides important granularity to avoid a situation in which security or cybersecurity scenarios escape us."

"The strength of this solution is the application delivery controller."

"The most valuable aspect is the ability to customize the types of load-balancing scenarios needed for customized applications. Some of the load balancers on the market today are strictly out-of-hand load balancers for SSL or HTTP. Radware Alteon is most useful for customizing in-house applications based on ports and protocols."

"The product offers high availability."

"I like the web GUI. It's very intuitive and easy to use."

More Radware Alteon pros

Cons

"Latencies are always a problem."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

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

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."

"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."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

More Cloudflare cons

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"Support can be challenging at times."

"The reporting could be more granular."

"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

"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."

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The user interface can be improved."

"Could have more customizations on the dashboard."

"The reverse proxy piece is a little bit complicated. If the reverse proxy were easier to implement, that would help."

"I would like to see the loading documentation improved."

"Recently our team was talking about the things you can customize in Alteon and the level of programming that doing so demands. I would like to see more information on how to customize the programming and troubleshoot."

"The solution could be more open to additional third-party add-ons being integrated into it."

"We’d like the solution to include more security features in the standard license."

"Alteon's user interface could be improved. F5's user interface is more user-friendly than Radware's, but Radware's hardware performs better."

More Radware Alteon cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

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

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"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."

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"The price is reasonable."

More Cloudflare 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."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"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."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"It is not too pricey."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The price conforms to what the tool provides. It is not an inexpensive tool and not all companies can afford an ADC solution such as Alteon. However, it justifies its price with the options it offers."

"Our government agency opted for Radware Alteon due to its affordability and efficiency. While I can't say precisely how much it costs the organization, the price per device. In India, we always look for affordable products, so I assume Alteon is cost-effective because the government chose it."

"Alteon's price is excellent compared to other solutions. F5 costs around twice as much. We still have about three years left before this hardware reaches the end of its life. We're migrating to the cloud, and phasing some of this out, but it's nice that they've given us a long window to keep their hardware in place."

"The pricing is better than the competition. It is getting more pricey as the years go on, as more people are migrating to it, and as the technology gets better."

"Radware LinkProof is neither cheap nor expensive."

"Price-wise, the solution is a reasonable one."

"We have three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain more discounts. It seems to be a much cheaper alternative."

"Its pricing is very good. It is very competitive. Radware Alteon is the leader in the market. At a lesser price, we get a good product and also good support. Other vendors who are providing load balancers charge separately for two items. You have the hardware cost, and you have the support cost, whereas, in the case of Radware, you get both in a single package."

More Radware Alteon pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The product has a valuable security control functionality.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available. This improvement wo...

See all answers

What do you like most about Radware Alteon?

It saves us a lot of work in terms of management since it has tasks already defined automatically. That enables us to...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Alteon?

We have a three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain mo...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Radware Alteon?

It is a fairly complete service and it is difficult for me to think of what can be improved. A feature that I would l...

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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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 17% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 15% of the time

AWS WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

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

Compared 7% of the time

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Competitors

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Radware Alteon

Compared 17% of the time

NetScaler vs Radware Alteon

Compared 14% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Radware Alteon

Compared 12% of the time

HAProxy vs Radware Alteon

Compared 8% of the time

More Radware Alteon Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

May 2025

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

Radware Alteon

April 2025

Download Radware Alteon product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Cloudflare WAF

Alteon, Radware AppWall

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

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

Radware Alteon is an application delivery controller (ADC) solution that provides global load balancing for all web, cloud and mobile-based applications. The solution is designed to help your organization simplify operations while ensuring resilience and SLA. It manages application traffic across both data and cloud center locations, optimizing availability and performance. In addition, Radware Alteon integrates multiple application protection services to provide protection against an array of cyberthreats.

Radware Alteon Features

Radware Alteon has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Robust
Load-balancing reverse proxy
Stable
Flexible
Guaranteed application availability
Application aware traffic redirection capabilities
Faster web application response time
Application specific optimized configuration guides
Configuration templates
Built-in virtualization
Built-in application and network security

Radware Alteon Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Radware Alteon. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Flexible deployment options: Radware Alteon is deployable in a multitude of form factors, including on-premises, virtual, and cloud, and provides a consistent application delivery and security service in any application environment.

Automation scripts library: To support faster time to service for complex application delivery and security services, Alteon is supported by an extensive range of automation scripts library. This also enables seamless integration of Radware Alteon services into the DevOps CI/CD processes.

Integrated application protection: The solution offers comprehensive application protection via embedded WAF, bot management, threat intelligence, and API protection capabilities. This ensures application availability and helps to minimize false positives, as well as keep applications along with their data secure.

Actionable visibility: With Radware Alteon you can stay ahead of issues and threats. The solution provides real-time visibility and actionable insights for proactive management of application availability and security issues before the user experience is impacted.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the solution.

PeerSpot reviewer Jefe de implementaciones de Datos at RETO Industrial S.A. de. C.V., mentions, “The simple and well-documented configuration allows us to be able to implement new balancing services at the request of the user with the same conditions and good service that they expect. We can also make changes to services that are already running, as I mentioned before, the graphical interface is very intuitive and you can almost always make the most common changes quickly. Radware has been characterized by being extremely robust. This gives us the confidence to offer our users a continuous service.”

A director of consulting says, “The most valuable features are the load-balancing and reverse proxy. Global-load balancing as well is valuable. I also find it to be stable. To date, we have not had any issues with it.”

An SOC Specialist at a tech services company explains, “The interface is easy, it's friendly, and has good alerting. When you have a problem with a server, it will alert you. It is useful in many areas, especially for web applications and load balancing. It's something that the customer can see on the internet.”

Radware

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Convergys

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Radware Alteon

April 2025

Free Report: Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Radware Alteon

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Radware Alteon and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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