F5 Advanced WAF vs Symantec Web Application Firewall comparison

F5 and Broadcom are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6, while Broadcom is ranked #44. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Symantec Web Application Firewall and F5 Advanced WAF compete in securing web applications. F5 Advanced WAF holds an advantage with its superior feature set and deployment flexibility.

Features: Symantec Web Application Firewall is notable for integration capabilities and comprehensive protection against web attacks. It provides a strong baseline of security. F5 Advanced WAF offers advanced threat intelligence, anti-bot protection, and behavior analysis for zero-day threats, giving it a feature advantage.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Symantec Web Application Firewall facilitates straightforward deployment and offers reliable customer service. F5 Advanced WAF supports flexible, scalable deployments and provides extensive customer service resources. While Symantec has comparable quality support, F5's scalable deployment model provides a slight edge.

Pricing and ROI: Symantec Web Application Firewall's competitive setup costs yield good ROI through efficient integration. F5 Advanced WAF, while requiring higher initial investment, delivers justified ROI with its advanced security capabilities and long-term benefits. Symantec's initial lower cost can be appealing, but F5's advanced features support its premium pricing for those seeking superior security enhancements.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall

April 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

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.

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reviewer1231533

Head IT Infrastructure (DGM-IT) at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

An excellent up-to-date data repository handling external threats successfully

We have multiple applications that we wanted to ensure were protected and we chose Symantec for that. I'm the head of IT infrastructure and we are partners with Symantec. Symantec has specifically helped connect external users to our internal network. It has also enabled us to ensure that those…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"It's very user-friendly."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

More Cloudflare pros

"Feature-wise, they are always cutting edge and up-to-date. Many features aren't available via competitors. There's always a lot of enhanced critical features that just aren't available through anyone else, or, if they are, are too lightweight."

"The web application firewall itself is most valuable. It provides positive security and negative security. In negative security, it blocks a task such as cross-site scripting, code injection, etc. In positive security, it lets you specify and enforce things, such as the parameters allowed in username and password fields and the number of characters allowed in a field."

"Very easy to implement and works well."

"Provides good protection from attacks."

"The support experience is better than average."

"The whole mechanism of F5 Advanced WAF is effective."

"The initial setup was was easy to install."

"The solution uses AI to protect against botnet attacks."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"The solution has an up-to-date data repository to deal with external threats."

"The interface is user-friendly."

"The setup was straightforward."

Cons

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"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 solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"The pricing could be improved."

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

More Cloudflare cons

"F5 needs to improve API protection with a single F5 solution, without requiring additional modules."

"Its price should be better. It is expensive."

"Users would like to have an additional IP intelligence license to handle this within WAF itself without needing to engage with the SOC team."

"The solution is tedious. It takes a lot of discrete settings so one needs to get detailed and granular when they use the solution. It takes you a whole lot of energy and concentration to configure. It needs to be much more straight-forward, like other web solutions."

"People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux"

"Support is a little slow."

"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."

"I would not expect traffic details to pass through the web application firewall across the length of the whole application. I think that there is a web application where it can let the application function without traffic going in into the WAF."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"I'm not convinced that it's necessary the best solution going forward in the future."

"Sometimes scanning slows down the endpoints."

"It would be an improvement if the management dashboards were not reliant upon Java."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."

"Licensing fees for this solution are paid on a yearly basis."

"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"After buying the program, you just pay for the support every year."

"The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price."

"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."

"F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Comms Service Provider

No data available

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

The price is affordable and satisfactory.

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

I do not have anything in mind right now that needs improvement. Generally, it works well. If we need any specific fe...

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Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 22% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 12% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Front Door vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

No data available

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

May 2025

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2025

Symantec Web Application Firewall report

Download Symantec Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Symantec WAF, Blue Coat Protecting Web Applications

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“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. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.

F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.

The Symantec Web Application Firewall (WAF) enables you to secure and accelerate your web applications.

Broadcom

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall

April 2025

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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