F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

F5 Advanced WAF and F5 Distributed Cloud Services are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 Advanced WAF is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4, while F5 Distributed Cloud Services is ranked #16 with an average rating of 8.8. F5 Advanced WAF holds a 3.9% mindshare in WAF, compared to F5 Distributed Cloud Services’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of F5 Advanced WAF users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of F5 Distributed Cloud Services users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and F5 Distributed Cloud Services based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services

June 2026

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Helped 908,834 peers since 2012

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 ...

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 F5 Advanced WAF is 3.9%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF	3.9%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	3.8%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	2.0%
Other	90.3%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

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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reviewer2797602

Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Granular security policies have protected critical applications and ensure safe user and admin access

Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a request gets blocked on the TCP layer, there should be traces or data to verify which source generated these requests, including the source and port information for initiation. These data are missing from F5 Advanced WAF. Besides that, another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients. Overall, I find everything else good. A wish list feature I have is for the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to respond more promptly. Their response time needs improvement; while they do not take excessive time, it can be enhanced, especially given it is a security product.

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Mohan Janarthanan

Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions

Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

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

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

"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."

"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."

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

"The setup process is very simple for me."

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"This is a good solution, it's very useful and offers easy application management, which is good to have at the perimeter level."

"Overall, I believe it has been a good decision to switch because I do not think any other product available on the market can compete with F5 at this time."

"It is easy to obtain dashboard compliance because security policy views are included."

"Very easy to implement and works well."

"I like the security features, especially against SQL injection."

"It provides web application security and reduces bot attacks."

"F5 Advanced WAF has significantly enhanced our organization's security posture by protecting critical banking applications against sophisticated threats."

"The solution is easily accessible on mobile and laptop devices."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."

"I appreciate the UI of F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the backend cost, alongside the actual value proposition that they provide with the load balancer, which is excellent."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."

"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."

"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."

Cons

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."

"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."

"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."

"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The solution's dashboard could be improved. When you're moving from policy to policy, the logs and the integration of the logs in other systems aren't straightforward."

"There is a learning curve that extends the time of implementation."

"Its price should be better. It is expensive."

"People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux"

"One area for improvement in the product is its SSO integration, which posed challenges and required significant effort to resolve."

"I would like to see additional controls."

"F5 Advanced WAF is not a cost-effective solution."

"One improvement for AOF could be focusing on enhancing its AI engine to make it more mature."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."

"One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced."

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."

"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."

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

"It is not too pricey."

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

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

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

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

"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

"Licensing fees for this solution are paid on a yearly basis."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"

"There is an annual subscription for this solution."

"I think the price is very high."

"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."

"It is expensive. Its price should be better. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. Its licensing is also based on the model. There are no additional costs."

"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Government

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

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	27
Midsize Enterprise	16
Large Enterprise	31

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	5

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

F5 Advanced WAF is somewhat costly compared to other vendors, but it is worth the investment due to the stability it ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a re...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for F5 Advanced WAF?

My main use case for F5 Advanced WAF is to protect external and internal applications from cyber attacks and to preve...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced.Specifically, ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

My main use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services is WAF protection.I am using F5 Distributed Cloud Services primari...

See all answers

Comparisons

Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

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

Compared 3% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 4% of the time

Indusface AppTrana vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 2% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Azure Front Door vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 12% of the time

Akamai vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudflare vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 7% of the time

Wib’s Fusion Platform vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 3% of the time

More F5 Distributed Cloud Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

August 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

August 2026

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services

August 2026

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

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

F5 Advanced WAF delivers robust web security with features like signature-based threat protection and behavior analysis, ensuring app stability and security.

F5 Advanced WAF integrates advanced security with functionalities such as SQL injection defense and real-time threat intelligence. It enhances security for applications with load balancing, bot detection, and DDoS protection alongside comprehensive attack monitoring capabilities. Popular among diverse sectors, its usability and easy integration make it a practical choice by providing a stable security infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud environments.

What are the key features?

Signature-Based Protection: Defends against SQL injections and other cyber threats with up-to-date signature detections.
Behavior Analysis: Reduces false positives by monitoring patterns and behaviors.
Load Balancing: Ensures application stability and optimal performance.
Bot Detection: Identifies and mitigates bot traffic to secure applications.
DDoS Protection: Guards against distributed denial of service attacks, maintaining service availability.
Real-time Threat Intelligence: Offers live updates and insights into potential security threats.

What benefits and ROI can organizations expect?

Enhanced Security: Comprehensive protection against an array of web-based threats.
Improved Performance: Raises application availability and user experience.
Deployment Flexibility: Supports diverse environments, from on-premises to cloud settings.
Ease of Integration: Simple incorporation into existing security frameworks.

Particularly relevant in banking and financial services, F5 Advanced WAF safeguards applications from threats like SQL injections and DDoS attacks, ensuring compliance and API security. Its capabilities are leveraged for both load balancing and application defense, offering a versatile deployment model suited for protecting critical infrastructure in competitive and demanding industries.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services

June 2026

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.

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