F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Rules for AWS WAF comparison

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. F5 Rules for AWS WAF

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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 Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.0%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Rules for AWS WAF is 0.4%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	4.0%
F5 Rules for AWS WAF	0.4%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.9%
Other	93.7%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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Mohan Janarthanan

Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions

Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

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Vibin Thomas

Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems

Advanced protection has reduced web attacks and improves application performance and operations

One area where F5 Rules for AWS WAF can be improved is in simplifying the tuning process. While F5 Rules for AWS WAF is powerful, fine-tuning it to match specific application behavior can sometimes be complex and time-consuming, especially for teams without deep WAF expertise. Another improvement could be enhanced visibility and reporting. Although AWS WAF provides logs, having more intuitive and built-in dashboards or clearer categorization of rule triggers would make it easier to quickly identify and analyze attack patterns. Additionally, expanding the capabilities around bot management and behavior analysis would be beneficial compared to some dedicated bot management solutions. More advanced detection techniques could further strengthen the protection against sophisticated automated traffic. Finally, providing more predefined templates or best practice recommendations for different application types would help speed up the deployment and reduce the initial configuration effort.

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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

"There is a huge signature repository"

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"It is configurable via API."

"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."

"It protects web applications efficiently."

"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."

"The setup process is very simple for me."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."

"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."

"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."

"F5 Rules for AWS WAF has positively impacted us by improving our web application security without adding too much operational overhead."

"F5 Rules for AWS WAF has positively impacted our organization for security through the implementation of traffic rules in our application."

"After implementing F5 Rules for AWS WAF, we observed a reduction of approximately 60 to 70% in web application security incidents reaching our application team, particularly blocking common threats like bot traffic and SQL injections without impacting our downstream systems."

"F5 Rules for AWS WAF is definitely recommended. It is a good tool for anyone to try and see if it matches their use case, and it is something that an organization can really benefit from."

"F5 Rules for AWS WAF should be highly recommended for AI applications, as security is a major concern, and using F5 helps prevent security issues and stabilizes organizations and applications."

"F5 Rules for AWS WAF's OWASP protection and bot protection have reduced attacks on my applications by 72 to 90%."

"Overall, the combination of reduced manual effort, improved security posture, and better application performance has delivered a strong return on investment."

"I advise anyone looking for a great tool to secure their public-facing applications to start using F5 Rules for AWS WAF."

More F5 Rules for AWS WAF pros

Cons

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"

"WAF doesn't directly affect bandwidth costs. It saves costs on protection. However, with the correct setup, it's difficult to determine if it saves costs overall due to the fixed enterprise plan fee."

"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."

"Its stability could be better."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."

"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."

"F5 Rules for AWS WAF can be improved by simplifying the tuning process to reduce false positives and providing more built-in dashboards for better visibility and further customization."

"F5 Rules for AWS WAF could be improved with deeper integration with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform for simplification, as well as more AI-driven recommendations for rules tuning to reduce false positives and better dashboards for visibility at the CXO level."

"There are potential false positives in F5 Rules for AWS WAF that sometimes require tuning."

"From an improvement standpoint, one area where F5 Rules for AWS WAF could improve is in simplifying policy management and making advanced configurations more intuitive, especially for teams that are newer to enterprise WAF technologies."

"One area where F5 Rules for AWS WAF can be improved is in simplifying the tuning process."

"An area for improvement I see is that while everything is in good shape, I demand continuous improvisation of these rule sets."

"I think F5 Rules for AWS WAF could be improved mainly around visibility, specifically having more actionable recommendations for false positives."

"It's too early to talk about a return on investment with F5 Rules for AWS WAF."

More F5 Rules for AWS WAF cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"It is not too pricey."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"The solution is expensive."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

33%

Comms Service Provider

16%

Computer Software Company

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	6

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.

What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I need to think about this for the future. F5 Distributed Cloud Services needs to create links with Amazon and Google...

What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I collect reviews for F5 Distributed Cloud Services and F5 Silverline Managed Services. I work with F5 Distributed Cl...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Rules for AWS WAF?

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 Rules for AWS WAF was good with purchasing and the s...

What needs improvement with F5 Rules for AWS WAF?

From an improvement standpoint, one area where F5 Rules for AWS WAF could improve is in simplifying policy management...

What is your primary use case for F5 Rules for AWS WAF?

My main use case for F5 Rules for AWS WAF is strengthening web application security for internet-facing applications ...

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Comparisons

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Compared 6% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

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Radware Cloud WAF Service vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

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Azure Front Door vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 13% of the time

Akamai vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 9% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 8% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 6% of the time

More F5 Distributed Cloud Services Competitors

No data available

Product Reports

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

F5 Rules for AWS WAF

Download F5 Rules for AWS WAF product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall integrates DDoS protection, load balancing, and firewall capabilities. Its ease of use, configurability, and robust security measures make it a versatile choice for protecting web applications.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive defense against threats with advanced reporting and robust security measures. It includes DNS integration, rate limiting, and extensive rule sets, all within a SaaS model that allows API configurability. Users value its caching, scalability, and pricing, although enhancements are needed in rate-limiting and third-party integration. Improvements in customer support, especially in India, real-time controls, and user documentation are also desired. Users seek a more intuitive dashboard, better log management, and improved alert systems, along with multitenancy capabilities and enhanced reporting.

What are the key features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

DDoS Protection: Shields applications from denial-of-service attacks
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution
DNS Integration: Enhances domain name system security
Rate Limiting: Controls traffic flow and reduces abuse
Extensive Rule Sets: Offers customizable security rules

What benefits and ROI can users find in reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing business needs
Pricing: Offers reasonable pricing structure
Caching: Improves application performance and speed
Configurable Security: Provides customizable defense settings
Efficient Management: Simplifies security and application control

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall finds application in industries like banking and retail by acting as a comprehensive security gateway, managing authentication and authorization while protecting web applications from malicious Layer 7 traffic. It also implements load balancing, CDN, and zero-trust policies, supported by advanced reporting, analytics tools, and threat scoring to meet specific industry needs.

Cloudflare

F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.

F5 Rules for AWS WAF provides advanced web application protection tailored to secure applications hosted on AWS, offering dynamic defenses against evolving threats.

This solution offers a robust set of rules designed to enhance AWS WAF capabilities, delivering specialized protections against complex web threats. F5 Rules dynamically guard against emerging vulnerabilities, ensuring comprehensive threat mitigation. It's crafted to integrate seamlessly with AWS environments, making it fast and easy to deploy, manage, and scale as compared with legacy alternatives, providing users a manageable and comprehensive security layer for their applications.

What are the key features of F5 Rules for AWS WAF?

Automatic Updates: Regularly refreshes its defenses to address the latest threats.
Pre-built Rules: Offers a library of pre-configured rules that are easy to deploy.
Scalable Configuration: Adapts seamlessly to changing web traffic conditions.

What ROI should users expect from F5 Rules for AWS WAF?

Improved Security Posture: Reduces risk exposure with specialized threat intelligence.
Cost Efficiency: Lowers operational costs by reducing the need for manual threat management.
Time Savings: Streamlines deployment and maintenance with quick setup and automated updates.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail, F5 Rules have been implemented to protect sensitive data and online transactions. This helps ensure compliance with industry regulations while maintaining performance and uptime for web applications.

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Information Not Available

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. F5 Rules for AWS WAF