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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.6
F5 Advanced WAF offers ROI by saving time, reducing costs, enhancing security, and ensuring compliance for businesses.
Sentiment score
6.0
Fastly boosts return on investment with improved performance, reduced latency, and cuts infrastructure costs by 40-60%.
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Realizing a 30 to 50% reduction in latency and page load time, ensuring users experience a seamless workflow.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
I have seen a return on investment, particularly in time savings, especially regarding the changes.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
F5 Advanced WAF's customer service is highly professional and knowledgeable, but response speed and availability need improvement for some users.
Sentiment score
6.3
Fastly's customer care is efficient with multi-channel support, but has inconsistencies in response times and transparency across time zones.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
Security Analyst at IBM
While they resolve issues well, the time taken for responses to non-critical issues should be shorter.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
CEO at CyberApp
demonstrating the team's technical expertise in CDN and Edge architecture
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
We have SLAs defined because we opted for enterprise support pricing.
Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
F5 Advanced WAF is scalable, efficiently handling large traffic, praised for flexibility, and easily upgraded to meet user needs.
Sentiment score
6.4
Fastly is praised for scalability, ease of growth support, cloud flexibility, excellent support, and successful global integrations.
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.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Seamlessly handling massive traffic without requiring backend changes due to its globally distributed Edge network and stateless API-driven design.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
F5 Advanced WAF is highly reliable and stable, rarely facing downtime, with user ratings of 8-10 for performance.
Sentiment score
7.3
Fastly is stable and reliable with high uptime, no technical issues, and strong performance in enterprise applications.
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
F5 Advanced WAF is stable, and there is no doubt it is one of the best WAFs in the market.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Highly reliable for enterprise-scale applications with high uptime guarantees.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
 

Room For Improvement

F5 Advanced WAF needs improvements in pricing, usability, API protection, bot detection, deployment, and advanced integration features.
Fastly requires improvements in China presence, configuration complexity, pricing, customer support, security features, documentation, and bot detection.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
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.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers find F5 Advanced WAF's pricing high but justified in banking, with complex licensing and higher setup costs.
Fastly is competitively priced with usage-based costs and customizable options, but some find it expensive with a learning curve.
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
CEO at CyberApp
It operates on a pay-as-you-go structure, but costs scale with traffic, requiring monitoring to avoid unexpected spikes based on data transfers and the number of requests handled.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
In terms of price, I find it good.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

F5 Advanced WAF offers robust application security with bot protection, DDoS mitigation, and customizable threat detection for improved efficiency.
Fastly CDNs integrate with Signal Sciences WAF for efficient content delivery, enhancing performance with global edge locations and code management.
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It contains the logic of both negative and positive security combined.
CEO at CyberApp
The best feature that Fastly offers is the Edge location, which reduces latency, making our applications work smoother because we do not have to constantly call the backend.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
Fastly has a wide number of configuration features that can be performed, and I emphasize that they can be done from code, which makes it much more traceable.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and WAF, web application firewall, additionally image optimization.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Categories and Ranking

F5 Advanced WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
25th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 3.6%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.2%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF3.6%
Fastly2.2%
Other94.2%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2797602 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Pranay Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
Edge caching has transformed response times and delivers faster candidate data globally
Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users. A more user-friendly, UI-based configuration could simplify the experience, alongside better templates for common use cases and dashboard improvements, as the current dashboard feels complex for beginners, and pricing can be hard to predict for smaller companies. I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities. However, VCL complexity and pricing predictability, especially for smaller companies, along with a user-friendly dashboard are areas impacting my score.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

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 provides to the environment and infrastructure.
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 request gets blocked on the TCP layer, there should be traces or data to verify wh...
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 prevent malicious payloads and malicious data from reaching servers. Even if maliciou...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?
In terms of price, I find it good, and as I mentioned, the implementation cost had some difficulty at the beginning due to the learning curve.
What needs improvement with Fastly?
I think Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples so that it is easier for developers, since at the beginning it becomes a bit complicated.
What is your primary use case for Fastly?
My primary use case for Fastly is using it as a CDN to speed up my customers' access to the applications. A specific example of how Fastly has helped improve my customers' access to the application...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
912,818 professionals have used our research since 2012.