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F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud 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
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
Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
19th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
CDN (11th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (26th), API Security (16th), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (9th)
 

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).
reviewer2812593 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Advanced threat protection has reduced financial risk and improves application security visibility
The issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the real-time analysis is not robust; I am unable to see all the logs of everything that happened, including what is passive. It only logs when there are suspicious activities, which means if something is not considered suspicious by Fortinet, I will not see the full picture. That is a disadvantage because it will not log unless it identifies an IOC or attacks, meaning I cannot see traffic information in a way that helps build more intelligence. The biggest issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the logging is not as extensive as I would prefer. For instance, if there was an issue two days ago and Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud did not mark it as a concern, I will not see any information about that, making it challenging to explain to customers if their request did not reach us. It hampers visibility from an API perspective. They need to enhance monitoring and logging to be more extensive and capture even passive activities. The AI integration in Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is still new. The generative models are good, but there is much work left to improve. It is not as intelligent as it could be; thus, enhancements around the AI co-assistant would be beneficial. Additionally, logging and monitoring need improvement as I can capture traffic and investigate offline on my Fortinet firewall, including full traffic view, but Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud currently focuses only on security concerns, which does not give the complete picture.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"The setup and functionality are fairly straightforward."
"The solution is easily deployable and has great functionality."
"I would say it's a good, stable solution; we haven't had a major issue with the AFM."
"The most valuable features for me are stability, availability, and security, along with the ability to manage multiple features to secure my applications."
"The solution is very straightforward, and the usability is great."
"What I find most impressive about F5 is that, as long as you know what you want to do, as long as we know what you want to achieve, you find the solution there."
"I find the signature base is very helpful to see traffic, to see the increase in web traffic."
"The product is stable, scalable, and easy to use."
"My favorite Fortinet device is the FortiGate next-gen firewall itself; it is a complete suite with intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, anti-malware, anti-DDoS, and SD-WAN functionalities."
"We have seen a reduction in incidents and a good return on investment from Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud, with our return on investment around 60%."
 

Cons

"The one feature that is paid is the custom nameservers instead of using the default ones, I want to use a custom one."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"I think they have failed with their technical support."
"The installation was complex until I learned what I had to learn."
"Perhaps I would ask that they improve the Free plan and allow us to use it with any TLD (certain ones are not allowed)."
"Yes, there were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side."
"I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years."
"I rate technical support quite badly."
"It doesn't compare to next generation firewalls"
"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."
"F5 should increase its capability to prevent zero-day attacks."
"Deployment times vary according to the customer. It needs to be heavily configured. You need to look and you need to observe the behavior of the traffic before you can start configuring everything. It can take time."
"Some spam can go by the firewall."
"We would have preferred to have support when we first started"
"The solution doesn't really meet our requirements for an edge firewall."
"Firstly, geolocation currently relies on manual updates. It has to move to automatic updates."
"The issue I have with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is that the real-time analysis is not robust; I am unable to see all the logs of everything that happened, including what is passive."
"Real-time traffic analysis has posed an issue for us because we did not see logs for legitimate traffic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 price is reasonable."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"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 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."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We have purchased a five-year licensing package for the product."
"It is somewhat on the expensive side although it is worth the additional cost."
"As per pricing, I would not say cheap, but little higher than cheap, but not very expensive. So you can say kind of value for money solutions."
"The product is expensive."
"It's very expensive, and you pay extra for the models."
"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."
"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager is not an expensive solution."
"We need to pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution."
Information not available
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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%
Construction Company
26%
Healthcare Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

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
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 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...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
Real-time traffic analysis has posed an issue for us because we did not see logs for legitimate traffic. A separate l...
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud is used as a WAF solution.
What advice do you have for others considering Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud?
We are a customer running Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud for both our organization and one for our customer. Three users ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
F5 AFM, F5 Advanced Firewall Manager
No data available
 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. Fortinet FortiAppSec Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.