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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud 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)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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
Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
23rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
CDN (11th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (19th), API Security (16th), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (9th)
 

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.
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.
reviewer2812593 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Advanced threat protection has reduced financial risk and improves application security visibility
The issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the real-time analysis is not robust; I am unable to see all the logs of everything that happened, including what is passive. It only logs when there are suspicious activities, which means if something is not considered suspicious by Fortinet, I will not see the full picture. That is a disadvantage because it will not log unless it identifies an IOC or attacks, meaning I cannot see traffic information in a way that helps build more intelligence. The biggest issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the logging is not as extensive as I would prefer. For instance, if there was an issue two days ago and Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud did not mark it as a concern, I will not see any information about that, making it challenging to explain to customers if their request did not reach us. It hampers visibility from an API perspective. They need to enhance monitoring and logging to be more extensive and capture even passive activities. The AI integration in Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is still new. The generative models are good, but there is much work left to improve. It is not as intelligent as it could be; thus, enhancements around the AI co-assistant would be beneficial. Additionally, logging and monitoring need improvement as I can capture traffic and investigate offline on my Fortinet firewall, including full traffic view, but Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud currently focuses only on security concerns, which does not give the complete picture.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"For us, the key feature of Cloudflare is DDoS protection and IP hiding, especially since we are a crypto company."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."
"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"The product is used to secure web applications and has the ability to use API templates and bot protection features, such as blocking requests or presenting CAPTCHA pages to end users."
"It protects and mitigates damage in the network."
"I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it."
"Across all of our customers, we have more than a million users at the same time with no issues."
"This is a good solution, it's very useful and offers easy application management, which is good to have at the perimeter level."
"The web application firewall itself is most valuable, providing positive and negative security by blocking threats such as cross-site scripting and code injection while allowing you to specify and enforce parameters like allowed values and character limits in fields such as username and password."
"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."
"With F5 Advanced WAF, it was protection for online publications and for our customers that caused us to choose the platform."
"We have seen a reduction in incidents and a good return on investment from Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud, with our return on investment around 60%."
"My favorite Fortinet device is the FortiGate next-gen firewall itself; it is a complete suite with intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, anti-malware, anti-DDoS, and SD-WAN functionalities."
 

Cons

"Support can be challenging at times."
"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."
"The reporting could be more granular."
"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."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"Cloudflare should update the version of the ModSecurity core rule set that they run on."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."
"The reporting portion of F5 Advance WAF is not great. They need to work out something better, as it is very basic."
"The administrator's user interface and some of the settings can sometimes be very complicated to understand."
"I would like to see the API Protection improved."
"You have to buy another module with an extra license to have the authentication feature."
"The user interface (UI) seems a bit outdated. Making it more user-friendly would be beneficial."
"More legacy protocols should be added to the solution."
"F5 needs to improve API protection with a single F5 solution, without requiring additional modules."
"Real-time traffic analysis has posed an issue for us because we did not see logs for legitimate traffic."
"The issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the real-time analysis is not robust; I am unable to see all the logs of everything that happened, including what is passive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"The solution is expensive."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"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."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"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."
"F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."
"Its price is fair. We have done a couple of deals where they were able to give some kind of discount to the customers. The price was initially high for the customers, but after a couple of negotiations, it came within their budget. They were happy with that."
"Licensing fees for this solution are paid on a yearly basis."
"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"
"I think the price is very high."
"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."
"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."
"There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
30%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare 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 Business28
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise31
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is a bit higher, but not that high. I would say for a good amount of revenue-generati...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
On the features I wish existed, Big-IP Advanced WAF is primarily an on-premises solution and in that solution, there ...
What is your primary use case for F5 Advanced WAF?
My main use case for F5 Advanced WAF is providing deployment solutions for financial institutions and onboarding thei...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
Real-time traffic analysis has posed an issue for us because we did not see logs for legitimate traffic. A separate l...
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is used as a WAF solution.
What advice do you have for others considering Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
We are a customer running Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud for both our organization and one for our customer. Three users ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.