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Cloudflare vs F5 Shape Security comparison

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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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Shape Security
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Fraud Detection and Prevention (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Cloudflare is designed for Web Application Firewall (WAF) and holds a mindshare of 5.0%, down 7.2% compared to last year.
F5 Shape Security, on the other hand, focuses on Fraud Detection and Prevention, holds 1.6% mindshare, down 2.1% since last year.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare5.0%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.4%
Fortinet FortiWeb4.1%
Other83.5%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Fraud Detection and Prevention Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Shape Security1.6%
ThreatMetrix4.3%
Riskified3.0%
Other91.1%
Fraud Detection and Prevention
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Nikolay Dimitrov - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security."
"CloudFlare provides an answer to a variety of issues, so it gives you very high value for your money."
"I have not had a DDOS attack since, or at least not become unavailable due to DDOS which means my ROI is pretty good."
"If you don't want to spend too much time hosting your own DNS server or managing the domain, Cloudflare is a great way to rapidly get websites and services online."
"Because our website is blazing fast it improves our conversion rates."
"The technical support on offer is excellent; they are very helpful and responsive, and we are quite happy with the level of service they provide to their customers."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration."
"F5 Shape Security's most valuable feature is performance."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years."
"We experienced some downtime in the fall of 2013, causing us to switch to Incapsula."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"More insight into analytics and threats would be a good place to start improving Cloudflare."
"I would like to not need a separate server for non-www redirection under the CNAME setup option."
"The Always Online feature has room for improvement. It seems to work sometimes and not others even with the pro version."
"I want the solution's custom exclusion rules to be more granular."
"The tool's price is high."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"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."
"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 cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The solution is moderately priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Healthcare Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
No data available
 

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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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.
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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Shape Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
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