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F5 Advanced WAF vs Virsec Security Platform 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
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) (13th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
Virsec Security Platform
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (36th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (56th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

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.
KevinMcCarthy - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps with Zero-day protection
We use the solution for Zero-day protection.  The solution stops any kind of remote code execution.  The tool's dashboard needs to load since it is not responsive and takes time to load.  I have been using the product for a year.  I would rate the tool's stability a six out of ten.  I would…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"It's very user-friendly."
"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."
"F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements."
"Good technology for mitigating different application attacks, e.g. DDoS, DNS, and layer seven attacks."
"F5 Advanced WAF is a stable solution, we are satisfied. It is more stable than ForiWeb."
"There is no need to worry about updating signatures because WAF will automatically update the signatures for you."
"This solution inspects your traffic and based on that, automatically create distinct qualities for you, so you can add this to the policy already created. That's what I like most."
"It can scale."
"F5 technical support is excellent. They are experts who always provide the right solution, and they understand the problem. Their response and resolution times are good."
"The AOF solution provides numerous security features."
"We use the solution for Zero-day protection."
 

Cons

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"Support response time could be improved."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"The reporting could be clearer and embedded to include our movement data."
"Compatibility with multiple cloud environments needs improvement. Both stability and scalability need to be improved."
"People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux"
"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 contextual-based component needs a lot of help to catch up with the next-gen products."
"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."
"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."
"We usually use a third-party tool for logging and reporting. It would be nice if we could do that right on this solution. They have one, but it's not very stable. Logging and reporting effectively would be a big enhancement."
"The tool's dashboard needs to load since it is not responsive and takes time to load."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"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."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"There are different licenses available to use F5 Advanced WAF, such as BT, ASM, and LPM."
"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."
"There is an annual subscription for this solution."
"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."
"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."
"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."
"The cost is slightly above average."
"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"
"I would rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Healthcare Company
29%
Manufacturing Company
20%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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 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...
What do you like most about Virsec Security Platform?
We use the solution for Zero-day protection.
What needs improvement with Virsec Security Platform?
The tool's dashboard needs to load since it is not responsive and takes time to load.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Virsec
 

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
Broadcom, Allstate, Department of Homeland Security
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5, Microsoft and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: May 2025.
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