

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.
Time savings in daily operations come from the automatic learning and signature update reducing the need for constant manual rule management, allowing the security and network teams to spend significantly less time handling false positive application-related escalations.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
I would estimate the cost was reduced by approximately 30 percent in the first year.
There is definitely a return on investment in F5 Distributed Cloud Services.
I do find F5 Distributed Cloud Services to be cost-effective, as it brings benefits and a strong return on investment.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
While they resolve issues well, the time taken for responses to non-critical issues should be shorter.
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
There is a lot of support from F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the knowledge on the page is very good and reliable.
I would provide 9.5 for support.
Email services are good, but they need to have a good human-based interaction with the call centers.
If you need to scale up, such as moving from a lower model to a higher one, the configuration from the lower model can be migrated easily without issues.
I can run it in HA mode or even divide the traffic volume to the number of instances that I have based on their resource sizing.
I need the traffic management environments in distributed management, which have a very good goal to manage very difficult traffic in the world.
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.
F5 Advanced WAF is stable, and there is no doubt it is one of the best WAFs in the market.
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
I won't face any issues with stability as a concern because it provides the load balancers and all redundancy, so it's very unlikely that we have any downtime.
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.
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.
The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF.
For availability, they have added additional clusters across all the regional edges in the Kubernetes clusters to enhance availability.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services doesn't have something like that. That is the reason why CloudFlare remains a leader in that space for small customers and those who have just started or are startups.
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.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable.
I believe the prices are much higher than I expected, but for the time being, the customer is still paying.
The Advanced Attack Signature database is very strong and regularly updated, effectively blocking SQL injections, cross-site scripting, command injections, and file inclusion attacks while allowing selective enabling or disabling of signatures to avoid blocking genuine traffic.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
It contains the logic of both negative and positive security combined.
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.
Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 Advanced WAF | 3.6% |
| F5 Distributed Cloud Services | 1.9% |
| Other | 94.5% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 27 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 16 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 7 |
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?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.
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