Cloudflare vs F5 Shape Security comparison

The compared Cloudflare and F5 solutions aren't in the same category. F5 is ranked #21 in FDP , and holds a 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Cloudflare users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and F5 Shape Security based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Fortinet, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF).

To learn more, read our detailed Web Application Firewall (WAF) Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2026

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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 Web Application ...

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

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.

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M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

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Nikolay Dimitrov

Cyber Security Engineer at Paysafe / IBM

Easy to configure and blocks bot attacks for web users

The solution is deployed on the F5 cloud. The solution's real-time analytics help you see what has been blocked. It helps to see whether the attack category was an automation attack or a fake browser. F5 Shape Security has a normal dashboard. We are doing F5 Shape Security migrations for 30 customers. F5 Shape Security uses Javascript. For a lot of competitors, the Javascript can be reverse-engineered by attackers to bypass the protection. F5 Shape Security has machine learning authentication of the Java script. If you had hacked it, the encryption would have been changed. It's really hard for attackers to reverse engineer the F5 Shape Security JavaScript. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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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

"I have not had any issues with this solution, and I would recommend it to others who are interested in using it."

"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."

"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."

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

"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."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"Stability is great; I love their mechanisms, I love their GUI, I love their front end, I love their behind the scenes, algorithms and everything, it all makes sense."

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"It is very clear and the information is very useful."

"I have not had a DDOS attack since, or at least not become unavailable due to DDOS which means my ROI is pretty good."

"Their free account offers an awful lot of functionality and savings alone, before you get on to the minimal $20 a month for a Pro account which comes with its own great list of features."

More Cloudflare pros

"F5 Shape Security's most valuable feature is performance."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration."

Cons

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"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."

"Cloudflare should update the version of the ModSecurity core rule set that they run on."

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

"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Yes, there were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

"Access to the solution's dashboards is not intended for a service company. You are practically blind, and to validate a problem, you must view the customer's screen."

"I think they have failed with their technical support."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"However, what I still fail to understand is that why aren't they offering domains themselves."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"I rate technical support quite badly."

More Cloudflare cons

"I want the solution's custom exclusion rules to be more granular."

"The tool's price is high."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not too pricey."

"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."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"The solution is expensive."

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

"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."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"The price is reasonable."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The solution is moderately priced."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

28%

Healthcare Company

Comms Service Provider

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	26

No data available

Questions from the Community

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

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.

See all answers

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Comparisons

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

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Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 36% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Fastly vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Akamai Bot Manager vs F5 Shape Security

Compared 17% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs F5 Shape Security

Compared 14% of the time

ThreatMetrix vs F5 Shape Security

Compared 6% of the time

BioCatch vs F5 Shape Security

Compared 6% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Shape Security

Compared 5% of the time

More F5 Shape Security Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

June 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

June 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Fraud Detection and Prevention

June 2026

Download F5 Shape Security product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

Cloudflare DNS

Shape Security

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall integrates DDoS protection, load balancing, and firewall capabilities. Its ease of use, configurability, and robust security measures make it a versatile choice for protecting web applications.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive defense against threats with advanced reporting and robust security measures. It includes DNS integration, rate limiting, and extensive rule sets, all within a SaaS model that allows API configurability. Users value its caching, scalability, and pricing, although enhancements are needed in rate-limiting and third-party integration. Improvements in customer support, especially in India, real-time controls, and user documentation are also desired. Users seek a more intuitive dashboard, better log management, and improved alert systems, along with multitenancy capabilities and enhanced reporting.

What are the key features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

DDoS Protection: Shields applications from denial-of-service attacks
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution
DNS Integration: Enhances domain name system security
Rate Limiting: Controls traffic flow and reduces abuse
Extensive Rule Sets: Offers customizable security rules

What benefits and ROI can users find in reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing business needs
Pricing: Offers reasonable pricing structure
Caching: Improves application performance and speed
Configurable Security: Provides customizable defense settings
Efficient Management: Simplifies security and application control

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall finds application in industries like banking and retail by acting as a comprehensive security gateway, managing authentication and authorization while protecting web applications from malicious Layer 7 traffic. It also implements load balancing, CDN, and zero-trust policies, supported by advanced reporting, analytics tools, and threat scoring to meet specific industry needs.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

F5 Shape Security provides advanced protection against automated attacks, safeguarding websites and mobile apps. It efficiently counters credential stuffing, carding, and other fraud-related threats, delivering robust security for enterprises.

F5 Shape Security functions by identifying and mitigating complex automated threats targeting web and mobile applications. It uses AI-driven analytics to adapt to evolving attack vectors, ensuring enterprises maintain secure environments. Its comprehensive approach analyzes user behavior and application requests to detect anomalies without compromising user experience.

What are the key features of F5 Shape Security?

Comprehensive Bot Protection: Detects and blocks malicious bots that attempt to exploit application vulnerabilities.
Credential Stuffing Mitigation: Prevents unauthorized access from credential stuffing attacks through advanced analytics.
Fraud Prevention: Identifies and mitigates fraud-related activities, ensuring the integrity of financial transactions.
Customizable Policies: Allows tailored security policies to meet specific threat landscapes.

What benefits and ROI should users expect?

Reduced Operational Costs: Automates threat detection, minimizing manual intervention.
Enhanced User Satisfaction: Protects accounts without impacting legitimate user access.
Scalable Security: Adjusts to increasing threat volumes without degrading performance.
Improved Compliance: Assists in meeting security standards with precise threat management.

F5 Shape Security is implemented in industries such as finance, retail, and healthcare where protection against sophisticated cyber threats is crucial. By providing real-time threat intelligence and adaptive defenses, organizations can defend their digital assets and maintain customer trust.

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

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

Wells Fargo, Loblaw, JetBlue, Zoosk

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2026

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