

Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
A large volume of malicious traffic was blocked at the WAF layer, preventing issues from reaching the backend servers, which reduced emergency troubleshooting and application team involvement, ultimately lowering operational stress and incident cost savings without requiring additional security tools.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
F5 Advanced WAF protects our organization and provides security, achieving a return on investment.
The major return on investment is the security of our data.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
F5 Advanced WAF provides the insights and notifications I need in terms of reporting and alerting.
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
I would rate the technical support of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) nine out of ten.
Overall, my experience with F5 is very good compared to Radware.
F5 Advanced WAF has been very reliable and consistent for us; in our on-premise enterprise setup, it has been stable and predictable in day-to-day operations without any unexpected crashes or WAF-related downtime in production.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
Overall, these are not blockers, merely enhancement opportunities, and once tuned, F5 Advanced WAF is very stable and reliable; improving usability, reporting, and onboarding would make it even more effective for larger environments.
Whenever something goes wrong or we have to whitelist anything, it clearly indicates where to go and where I have to make modifications.
The pricing of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is on the higher side compared to competitors, but it is worth it.
Licensing is capacity-driven, so you need careful planning based on traffic volume and use cases, and adding features such as Bot Protection impacts costs; once licensing is clear and sized correctly, there are no surprises.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
The product is costly.
After implementing F5 Advanced WAF, we saw a significant reduction in web-based attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and automated malicious traffic, allowing us to block real threats before they reached the backend server.
F5 Advanced WAF offers the best features that are capable of stopping any type of attack, and it is a really reliable and stable product that you can rely on to stop any type of attack.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
The impact of SSL offloading on reducing server load and latency is very much positive because whatever traffic we receive, we encrypt at our F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) level, which has definitely reduced the additional load and SSL decryption load on the servers, so it has very much helped us and it is very smooth; it will not take much time and will not impact our regular traffic.
One of the most beneficial features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is its ability to identify compromised traffic and its capabilities in authentication.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 Advanced WAF | 7.8% |
| Fortinet FortiWeb | 8.1% |
| Imperva Application Security Platform | 7.6% |
| Other | 76.5% |
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) | 15.3% |
| NetScaler | 13.2% |
| HAProxy | 9.9% |
| Other | 61.6% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 25 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 62 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 32 |
| Large Enterprise | 85 |
F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.
F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.
F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.
BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.
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