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F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
Cloudflare's services enhanced security and efficiency, resulting in significant ROI, cost savings, and improved WordPress performance for businesses.
Sentiment score
6.4
F5 BIG-IP AFM offers cost-effective returns with F5 bundles, though standalone returns are moderate, providing practical daily value.
Sentiment score
6.4
F5 Silverline enhances efficiency, boosts revenue, saves time, and provides secure services without needing extra cybersecurity staffing.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
Owner at Hga consulting
The return on investment for me is significant as time is the critical aspect.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Our revenue has grown substantially after the introduction of F5 Silverline Managed Services.
Product Management Consultant at Mafoi Strategic Consultants
I have seen a return on investment in the time saved.
Cloud Support at a security firm with 51-200 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
Cloudflare's support is responsive and knowledgeable, with varying experiences depending on the plan and need for faster escalation.
Sentiment score
6.8
F5 BIG-IP AFM support is responsive and praised, though expertise varies; customer service is excellent, communication needs improvement.
Sentiment score
6.3
F5 Silverline's support is praised for responsiveness but criticized for slow responses and unresolved issues, impacting satisfaction.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
Owner at Hga consulting
We use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds.
General Manager at bKash Limited
The responses are generally fast and effective.
System Advisor at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The customer service is excellent, and I rate it ten out of ten.
Network Security Engineer at IIPL
I rate the technical support by F5 a ten from one to ten.
Information Security Engineer at BigFish Enterprise Ltd.
I think 24/7 expert support and streamlined compliance management definitely benefit my company's security efforts.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Configuration problems largely arise from customer misunderstanding, leading to cases opened for configuration aspects where AI has become increasingly useful.
Network And Security Consultant at TD SYNNEX
They resolve the issues by joining me to fix them.
Design & Delivery Senior Network Security Architect at Qiddiya Investment Company
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cloudflare excels in scalability, supporting seamless transitions and performance during high-traffic periods, highly rated by users.
Sentiment score
7.0
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager is scalable and flexible, supporting diverse environments and thousands of users daily.
Sentiment score
7.2
F5 Silverline Managed Services offers scalable solutions for various user bases with easy upgrades, despite some complexity in packet management.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
Cloudflare's scalability is quite good; it is very easy to scale whenever we want to include multiple domains.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
The solution is highly scalable, allowing me to add or remove nodes and manage traffic without interruption, which is essential for meeting application demands.
System Advisor at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The solution is fully scalable, and I would give it a rating of ten on a scale of one to ten for scalability.
Design & Delivery Senior Network Security Architect at Qiddiya Investment Company
F5 Silverline Managed Services is not a concern due to its scalability.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
F5 Silverline Managed Services has elastic scalability, handling immense traffic spikes effectively.
Lead Engineer at a renewables & environment company with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Cloudflare is reliable with high stability ratings, minimal issues, improved network connectivity, and praised fast DNS services.
Sentiment score
8.4
F5 BIG-IP AFM is highly rated for stability, reliability, and efficient logging, with no major bugs or issues reported.
Sentiment score
7.6
F5 Silverline is praised for reliable stability, effective incident monitoring, and surpasses competitors with regular updates and support.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
Cloudflare's reliability and uptime has met my expectations; it has been quite good in general.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
I have not seen anything suspicious with its accuracy or output.
Product Management Consultant at Mafoi Strategic Consultants
 

Room For Improvement

Users suggest improvements in Cloudflare's features, pricing, support, analytics, documentation, and partner relations for better service experience.
F5 BIG-IP AFM needs better GUI, cloud integration, pricing, support, reporting, and zero-day prevention to enhance user experience.
F5 Silverline Managed Services requires improvements in deployment speed, pricing, global presence, interface, APIs, stability, and compliance features.
Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements.
General Manager at bKash Limited
What Cloudflare is doing internally is that it is stepping ahead in areas like detection and protection.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Having advanced technology similar to other vendors like Palo Alto for zero-day attack prevention would be valuable.
Network Security Engineer at IIPL
The appliance and features could be enhanced further, especially in terms of security.
System Advisor at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I would assess the importance of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)'s integration with cloud services as significant.
Information Security Engineer at BigFish Enterprise Ltd.
F5 Silverline Managed Services needs to adapt compliances related to India's DPDP.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Localized support could enhance F5 Silverline Managed Services.
Cloud Support at a security firm with 51-200 employees
Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles.
Design & Delivery Senior Network Security Architect at Qiddiya Investment Company
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare provides cost-effective, feature-rich plans for varying traffic needs, offering significant value compared to competitors like Akamai.
F5 BIG-IP AFM is costly yet valued for its stability, functionality, and perceived value for money despite high pricing.
Enterprise buyers have mixed views on F5 Silverline pricing due to variable costs and potential discounts but appreciate its performance.
I find it to be cheap.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The standard license is reasonably priced, but additional features like the WAF can be more expensive.
System Advisor at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
If considering a one-stop solution that provides load balancing, DNS security, AAA authentication, and firewalling on the same hardware, the cost is reasonable.
Network Security Engineer at IIPL
The solution is expensive
Design & Delivery Senior Network Security Architect at Qiddiya Investment Company
Regarding the pricing of F5 Silverline Managed Services, I would say it is quite affordable.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was good, as it was easy to use and choose.
Lead Engineer at a renewables & environment company with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare offers superior caching, DNS management, and security, enhancing performance, global reach, and domain management with innovative features.
F5 BIG-IP AFM provides robust security and performance with features like DDoS protection and AI-driven traffic analysis.
F5 Silverline provides continuous DDoS protection, WAF, and fraud defense, enhancing security and performance with real-time threat intelligence.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Most of our DNS records that are presented to the internet are proxied whenever possible, providing another layer of defense from our perspective.
Senior Security Engineer at ManpowerGroup
Cloudflare has positively impacted our organization by giving us flexibility to manage the DNS part, being quite fast, and allowing us to manage everything from a single dashboard.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
The solution provides behavioral analysis via AI to detect malicious traffic.
Network Security Engineer at IIPL
The most valuable features for me are stability, availability, and security, along with the ability to manage multiple features to secure my applications.
System Advisor at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I think the DDoS features are valuable in F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM), and I recommend it usually for certain types of companies.
Information Security Engineer at BigFish Enterprise Ltd.
It allows for centralized management of certificates, protecting applications from top ten attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
Design & Delivery Senior Network Security Architect at Qiddiya Investment Company
One part is positive security, which allows you to know vulnerabilities in depth, and you can implement CAPTCHA and MFA for logins, while also preventing known threats with included signatures.
Network And Security Consultant at TD SYNNEX
F5 Silverline Managed Services has positively impacted my organization by drastically helping us during a major DDoS attempt or web scraping that was detected, where F5 handled the triage and mitigation entirely.
Lead Engineer at a renewables & environment company with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (10th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (15th)
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall...
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Silverline Managed Services
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 12.9%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is 1.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 2.5%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare12.9%
F5 Silverline Managed Services2.5%
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)1.7%
Other82.9%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
Nawapol Boonlerd - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Engineer at BigFish Enterprise Ltd.
Comprehensive network protection has mitigated DDoS risks and supports secure on-prem operations
Currently, there are no weaknesses or disadvantages in F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) that I have identified. It is a little bit expensive, and I think about additional features they could have in the future to make it even better. For example, I have thoughts about the price. Currently, it does not integrate, and I would assess the importance of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)'s integration with cloud services as significant. Currently, I use only one site, and I cannot tell you about F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) centralized security policies. I have not used F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)'s Threat Intelligence capabilities. I have not used their dynamic traffic shaping feature. So far, the only thing that could be improved is the pricing of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM).
Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Cloud applications have gained stronger protection and real-time defense against web attacks
What really stands out for me in terms of advantages of F5 Silverline Managed Services is that in a single cloud platform, I can protect my web applications against attacks. I can also use my load balancer in F5 because they are providing and acting as a load balancer too, and they will support the volumetric and DDoS attacks and malicious attacks. Regarding the real-time threat intelligence feature, I do use this aspect in F5 Silverline Managed Services. It blocks malicious IPs or bad IPs for my server, protecting against my applications. For example, if someone is a bad actor trying to access via a malicious IP, I can block it because the threat intelligence has the capability to block the malicious IP. The adaptable and flexible security impacts threat response time positively. It is effective because it blocks my malicious traffic. Whenever I face issues related to that application, it automatically routes my traffic to act as a proxy and routes my traffic to their scrubbing center, especially in case of any volumetric attack.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
11%
Engineering Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Insurance Company
9%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise11
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?
The standard license is reasonably priced, but additional features like the WAF can be more expensive. There are plen...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?
Currently, there are no weaknesses or disadvantages in F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) that I have identifi...
What is your primary use case for F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?
I am starting to learn and working with F5 team to conduct a proof of concept, and I do have experience with F5 Rules...
Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?
For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?
Regarding the pricing of F5 Silverline Managed Services, I would say it is quite affordable.
What needs improvement with F5 Silverline Managed Services?
One thing that was a hassle for us regarding F5 Silverline Managed Services was the deployment of this particular sof...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
F5 AFM, F5 Advanced Firewall Manager
F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection
 

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.
City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office
City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.