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F5 Advanced WAF vs Sucuri 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
Sucuri
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (22nd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (14th), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (12th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Richard Polyak - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable
Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.
David Shlingbaum - PeerSpot reviewer
Simple solution and good WAF
Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section. Users get errors or EBAs, and if they want to read about it, they need to find it in the help section of the site. It would be more helpful to allow users to see more information and tips immediately from within the alert.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"Very easy to implement and works well."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the easy identification of events and customization. We can pinpoint our settings."
"It also has antivirus and DDoS mitigation capabilities. We have enabled these features."
"Good dashboard and reporting."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the WAF protection, Data Safe, and the seven-layer DDoS."
"The solution's most valuable features include application DDoS protection, bot blocking, and HTTP header verifications."
"It provides web application security and reduces bot attacks."
"We can monitor IP locations, but we have constraints from each country. It has a replication feature. Licenses can be shared, taking turns with each license."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"It significantly eases the workload and streamlines the initial setup required to protect a website."
"The most valuable part is the analytics and visualization."
"Domain name scanning since it allows us to scan all our domain names and determine whether it has malware or if is reported as phishing."
"The initial setup was straightforward. Straight forward because the plugin can simply be installed and then it does its job. It's not complex, there is no learning curve. The online scan is simple, you put in the website address and the scan gives us a report on the browser itself. It's simple to use."
"I use it as a WAF, which is basically a web firewall to monitor and block traffic to our web server."
 

Cons

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"The pricing could be improved."
"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"F5 Advanced WAF sells perpetual licenses as perpetual assets during sales without informing me that support ends after a few years."
"They could provide better pricing."
"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."
"I think the deployment templates can be better."
"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."
"The interface is old-looking, it's not modern, which is why it's not always comfortable to use."
"The pricing could be more flexible."
"The reporting portion of F5 Advance WAF is not great. They need to work out something better, as it is very basic. You only see the top IPs, I think there is more they can offer."
"It would greatly benefit customers if they implemented an online chat or messaging system for quicker assistance."
"The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I would include more sites in the protection."
"Confident score: Currently it does not have one and there are cases that most websites flagged are false-positives."
"Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section."
"In terms of improvement, the cost factor is always there."
"I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that we have found sometimes customers or Google saying that there is something wrong with the website but Sucuri says that the site is clean so we do have to look at the site manually which means that the Sucuri scan does not pick up anything and everything."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"We are using the free version."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."
"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."
"The pricing is too high."
"It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required."
"F5 Advanced WAF is not a cost-effective solution. Although they are attempting to reduce prices with their VE and cloud options, they are more expensive than other solutions. The solution is more expensive on average."
"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."
"As far as the pricing of F5 Advanced WAF I would rate it a four out of five depending on what features I am looking for. Imperva is more expensive."
"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."
"Sucuri offers different plans, both the standard plan and an advanced plan. So there are different plans to choose from."
"It stands out as a more cost-effective option compared to other cloud-based security services like Cloudflare or JetPass."
"The ROI has been very good. Because of the solution, I have a tax break. The site developers were not always experienced people. We used to pay more for cleaning up the site when it was infected. Now, we have peace of mind knowing that the solution will clean up the site and that we won't have to go through the unnecessary process of restoring it from a backup. The protection on the WAF and the measures for backups have also prevented our site from going down."
"I’d simply say it’s really worth it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Educational Organization
42%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?
It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the r...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost, leading to amb...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
F5 Advanced WAF sells perpetual licenses as perpetual assets during sales without informing me that support ends afte...
What do you like most about Sucuri?
The initial setup was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sucuri?
The pricing is very reasonable. Sucuri offer other features as an add-on, such as backup, but these have an additiona...
What needs improvement with Sucuri?
The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I woul...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
The Loft Salon, Tom McFarlin, WPBeginner, Taylor Town, Everything Everywhere, Financial Ducks in a Row, Chubstr, Real Advice Gal, Sujan Patel, Wallao, List25, School the World
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Sucuri and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.