We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, F5 Advanced WAF seems to be the superior solution. Our reviewers find that the questions concerning Microsoft Azure Application Gateway’s stability and scalability make it a riskier investment than F5 Advanced WAF.
"The most valuable features of the F5 Advanced WAF are the enhanced ASM and the performance. Additionally, the usability and effectiveness are very good."
"My favorite feature of F5 is the ability to play around with the ciphers. I also like the ability to have an immediate display of the support IDs when a real blockage occurs. The protection offered is great."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its ability to have a pool of resources that can distribute your traffic, and that is a plus for me. My company tried to look into a competitor, Imperva, but it was lacking that capability, so F5 Advanced WAF outperforms Imperva."
"F5 Advanced WAF has very good stability and scalability. Its initial setup was straightforward."
"F5 Advanced WAF is a stable solution, we are satisfied. It is more stable than ForiWeb."
"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."
"Very easy to implement and works well."
"Good technology for mitigating different application attacks, e.g. DDoS, DNS, and layer seven attacks."
"The solution has built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure."
"I like the tool's stability and performance."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is its ease of use."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is traffic management."
"It has a filter available, although we are not currently using it because it is not part of our requirements. But it is a good option and when it becomes part of our requirements we will definitely use it."
"We find it valuable because it is compatible with our existing Azure solution."
"The solution provides great automation and it is easy to upgrade service."
"The most valuable feature is WAF."
"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features."
"The solution could improve by having an independent capture module. It has a built feature that you can deploy the capture on your published website. However, it's not very user-friendly. When you compare this feature to Google Capture or other enterprise captures, they are very simple. It needs a good connection to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. When you implement this feature in the data center, you may suffer some complications with connecting to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. This should be improved in the future."
"While F5 Advanced WAF does limit the number of partners in certain regions to ensure successful business transactions, they could also benefit from expanding their partnerships and making it easier for more people to learn about and become experts in F5 Advanced WAF. By doing so, they could increase the reach and exposure of their solution, similar to how Cisco has become widely recognized in the security industry."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve resource usage, it is CPU intensive. Additionally, adding automated remediation would be a benefit. For example, an easy button alerts us of the events that are occurring, and what we want to do at the time. An automated approach where somebody could be alerted very quickly. Instead of going and reconfiguring everything, an automated approach is what I'm looking at."
"F5 Advanced needs to improve its bot protection. The solution needs to have machine learning to learn the behavior of the customer to recognize the human versus the bot. This is a difficult feature to explain to our customers. I would like documentation about the bot feature to make it easier for the customer to understand."
"Nevertheless, F5 products are generally considered to be hard to deploy."
"I would like for there to be a cloud-based solution, this would also help to improve scalability."
"The graphical interface needs improvement because it is not user friendly."
"In the next release, the solution could improve the integration with Service Mesh and other Azure Security Services."
"It could be easier to change servicing."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway could improve by allowing features to use more third-party tools."
"I want the solution's support to improve. The tool is also expensive."
"The solution could improve by increasing the performance when doing updates. For example, if I change the certificate it can take 30 minutes. Other vendors do not have this type of problem."
"The increased security that we are considering is because of some of the things that the security team has brought to our attention. They have pointed out that we would most likely require a better web application firewall than Azure Application Gateway."
"It is a bit tricky to configure. You've got to have a very specific format to configure it. They should make it a little bit easier to configure. Mapping the certificates into it isn't easy, and it could be better. Currently, you've to write a bit of automation to pull certificates directly to HTTPS."
More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Pricing and Cost Advice →
F5 Advanced WAF is ranked 4th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 31 reviews while Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is ranked 5th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 11 reviews. F5 Advanced WAF is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is rated 7.0. The top reviewer of F5 Advanced WAF writes "Flexible configuration, reliable, and highly professional support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway writes "High stability with built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure". F5 Advanced WAF is most compared with Fortinet FortiWeb, Imperva Web Application Firewall, AWS WAF, NGINX App Protect and Barracuda Web Application Firewall, whereas Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is most compared with Azure Front Door, Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), AWS WAF and HAProxy. See our F5 Advanced WAF vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway report.
See our list of best Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors.
We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
