F5 Advanced WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

F5 Advanced WAF vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

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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

Herb Angle

Owner at Hga consulting

Has helped manage client domains with streamlined access control and threat visibility

I don't know what areas could be improved with Cloudflare WAF; Cloudflare is constantly improving and adding features to their feature set. They're doing a good job, and as far as DNS and support for any domains that I create or my clients create, it's mandatory for me to make sure that they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider. The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service. It doesn't pay to try to host your own website.

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Kallamuddin Ansari

Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize

Application security has protected critical banking services while policy learning minimizes false blocks

F5 Advanced WAF performs well overall, but I have noticed some points that could enhance the solution. Initially, policy tuning could be simpler, as while the learning engine is powerful, initial tuning still requires experienced engineers, which can be challenging for new teams due to the complexity of options and parameters. A more guided and simple tuning workflow would help reduce the learning curve. Additionally, tighter native integration with SIEM or SOAR tools would simplify correlation and investigations for security teams, although log exports are available. 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.

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reviewer2161107

Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Room for improvement with user interface while competitive pricing impresses

It is managed through Infrastructure as Code, so all configurations can be managed in the code itself, which is beneficial. Because it uses rules, it is easy to set up, and we have many different sites where the configurations are straightforward. Though the UI is not very interactive, which is a downside, we can manage many things. The UI is not very intuitive and could be better. However, we manage all the configurations through code, which is easy to maintain. It has extensive anomaly detection capabilities, so the traffic is classified into several categories where thresholds can be defined and customized based on false positives and false negatives. This is advantageous because you do not need to tweak it very often. Once you set it up, an audit once a quarter would suffice. Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate.

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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

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."

"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."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

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

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

"There are a lot of good features."

"WAF functionality is valuable for protecting applications from attacks."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the overall capabilities, there is not a comparable solution on the market."

"It's flexible and powerful, and the users can input their own rules to the system."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the WAF protection, Data Safe, and the seven-layer DDoS."

"F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements."

"The solution is stable."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."

"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."

"Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate."

Cons

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

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

"Technical support is lacking."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"Eventually, things go sideways and require fixes when it would have been easier to prevent the issue initially."

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

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

More Cloudflare cons

"I would like to see additional controls."

"Nevertheless, F5 products are generally considered to be hard to deploy."

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

"I would like to see improved features in the F5 Advanced WAF solution, especially with a focus on enabling Kubernetes fully."

"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."

"I think the most significant improvement needed is reconsidering the price, as it is really expensive compared to other vendors."

"F5 Advanced WAF sells perpetual licenses as perpetual assets during sales without informing me that support ends after a few years."

"The administrator's user interface and some of the settings can sometimes be very complicated to understand."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."

"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."

"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."

"The UI is not very intuitive and could be better."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"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."

"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."

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

"I give the price a five out of ten."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

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

"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."

"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"

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

"It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"There is an annual subscription for this solution."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."

"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."

"The product has an affordable cost."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

10%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	25

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	30

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?

Regarding the price, I think the cost is a bit higher compared to others. Earlier we were using Radware, and compared...

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

In terms of additional features I would like to see from them in the future, I think the GTM is a bit complicated to ...

What do you like most about Signal Sciences?

The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?

The pricing is very competitive compared to other providers. The pricing is definitely a factor in our decision-makin...

What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?

We do use it, but the UI can be improved as we mostly work through the CI/CD. It provides support, but sometimes it i...

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Comparisons

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Akamai vs Cloudflare

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Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 28% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 8% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 7% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 2% of the time

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AWS WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 15% of the time

Sqreen vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 11% of the time

Azure Front Door vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 9% of the time

NGINX App Protect vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

F5 Advanced WAF

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Download The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) product report

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

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 Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) provides web application and API protection, RASP, rate limiting, bot protection and DDoS purpose built to eliminate the challenges of legacy WAF.

Fastly

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

Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus

F5 Advanced WAF vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)