F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs Fastly comparison

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. Fastly

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.6%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is 1.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.2%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

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

Straightforward setup with very good granularity and performance

Our company uses the solution as a data center firewall. It is hard to determine all users within our infrastructure. It depends on systems we put behind the solution. Its internal but also a data center firewall. Sometimes, there are hooks from the solution to our external infrastructure or…

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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"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's very user-friendly."

"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."

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

More Cloudflare pros

"I find the signature base is very helpful to see traffic"

"It blocks various attacks and mitigates disasters from occurring."

"The most valuable feature of F5 BIG-IP AFM is all of my workers enjoy using it."

"Its performance and ease of use are valuable."

"The web application firewall has been very helpful. We purchased F5 when we were migrating our applications to the cloud."

"The decryption is great."

"The customer service is excellent, and I rate it ten out of ten."

"The solution is easily deployable and has great functionality."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) pros

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

Cons

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"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."

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"Technical support is lacking."

More Cloudflare cons

"The appliance and features could be enhanced further, especially in terms of security. Some features like the WAF firewall may seem expensive compared to the standard license, so there could be room for adjusting the pricing."

"The solution's UI could be improved."

"Firstly, geolocation currently relies on manual updates. It has to move to automatic updates. There are no automatic updates for this feature. If some IPs, countries, or service providers move to another country, now you will be allow IPs that you previously denied. This is because you depend on the database, which doesn't update automatically. This is really a very important area that they need to improve."

"There should be simplified and better integration with BIG-IQ."

"We needed to protect the database but the solution didn't offer a certain feature to do so."

"Apart from the price, I feel no other areas need improvement."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager's pricing and technical support services need improvement."

"F5 should increase its capability to prevent zero-day attacks."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) cons

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"Support is not that great."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable."

"We are using the free version."

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

"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."

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

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price of F5 BIG-IP AFM is a little more expensive than other firewalls on the market."

"We have purchased a five-year licensing package for the product."

"F5 BIG-IP AFM is an affordable solution. There were not any additional fees other than the standard licensing."

"We need to pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution."

"It's very expensive, and you pay extra for the models."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager is not an expensive solution."

"It is somewhat on the expensive side although it is worth the additional cost."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is an expensive solution. They are one of the best in the market, but the price could be cheaper."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) pricing and cost advice

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"It is an expensive solution."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

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850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

17%

Government

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 Firewall Manager?

CGNAT is one of its strong areas.

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?

The appliance and features could be enhanced further, especially in terms of security. Some features like the WAF ( /...

What do you like most about Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

What needs improvement with Fastly?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

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

Arbor DDoS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 48% of the time

AWS Shield vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 16% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 15% of the time

A10 Thunder TPS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudflare One vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 9% of the time

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 20% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Edgio vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Download F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) product report

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) report

Fastly

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

F5 AFM, F5 Advanced Firewall Manager

No data available

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 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network. Built on F5’s industry-leading BIG-IP hardware and software platforms, BIG-IP AFM provides a scalable platform that delivers the flexible performance and control needed to mitigate aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and protocol attacks before they overwhelm and degrade applications and infrastructure availability.

For service providers, BIG-IP AFM IPS does even more, protecting the network edge and performing traffic inspection and protocol adherence for prevalent service provider protocols such as SS7, Diameter, HTTP/2, GTP, SCTP and SIP traffic coming into the network over UDP, TCP, and SCTP.

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

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.

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. Fastly