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Cloudflare vs Wallarm NG WAF 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 Web Application ...
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Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudflare
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Wallarm NG WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
39th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
API Security (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 3.8%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 5.2%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Wallarm NG WAF is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall3.8%
Cloudflare5.2%
Wallarm NG WAF1.0%
Other90.0%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

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.
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.
it_user796242 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Helps us to monitor attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them
Set up Wallarm as a reverse proxy. Do not replace your web server. Use Wallarm first in monitoring mode, then learn from Wallarm which type of request is false positive and which type of request is not. This process takes a couple of weeks for very highly-loaded web applications (few millions of unique visitors in one month). Then you can turn Wallarm into blocking mode and everything will be fine. Do not forget to build a monitoring system, the wave, and API for it. Before we started using Wallarm, I already knew Ivan (CEO) and Stepan (COO) from a couple of years before. Ivan had his own security company and Stepan was working on a Russian security magazine called Xakep. They told us that they wanted to create a new WAF and already had a working version of it. They asked me to test it. We did tests, and it was really good. After few month after testing, we signed an agreement. Our choice was made not because we knew these guys for a long time, but because the product was really cool and we were glad to start using it as one of the first on the market!

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 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 rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."
"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."
"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."
"It is configurable via API."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"Using the CDN of Cloudflare improved the speed significantly, reducing the page loading times to appropriate levels."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"CloudFlare's caching brings the load speed down from 4.32 seconds to 2.45 seconds."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"With active threat detection, we are no longer over-swamped with tons of useless events."
"Perimeter control and active vulnerability scanner are the most valuable features."
"Helps us to monitor situation in regards to attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them."
"They are the only solution that fits our success criteria and business objectives: WAF must have a low (<5%) false negative rate and be ready to protect from all well-known web attacks."
"Vulnerability scanner and WAF are valuable features."
"The most powerful feature is the ability to first learn what type of query to make to your web application when it is attacked and what type of query creates a false positive to your app."
 

Cons

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."
"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing could be improved."
"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."
"It looks like they don't support as many TLDs as other registrars, but since they are very new as a registrar, I expect this may improve soon."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"For the services I am using, it is a bit expensive."
"There should at least be a read-only view of the data so that resellers can properly support the clients."
"The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"Technical support is 6 or 7 out of 10. Sometimes we have had trouble with communication and understanding."
"Wallarm uses a learning mechanism to detect attacks and to avoid false positives. If Wallarm blocks some illegitimate request, then you can go to the management console and mark this request as false positive, but sometimes this does not work properly."
"It needs more customization in PDF reports."
"There were several stability issues during the first pilot."
"The biggest problem for us was the stability and speed using the first version of Wallarm. Now, it is fine."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"It is not too pricey."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We are using the free version."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"​Pricing must be cheaper than the competition and the licensing must be good.​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Government
11%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 WAF
Cloudflare DNS
Wallarm NG-WAF
 

Overview

 

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.
Panasonic. Miro. Rappi. Wargaming. Gannett. Omio. Acronis. Workforce Software. Tipalti. SEMRush.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Wallarm NG WAF and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
907,816 professionals have used our research since 2012.