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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service 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 Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), API Security (7th)
Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
23rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.0%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services1.9%
Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service0.8%
Other93.3%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
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.
Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
NiteshSharma - PeerSpot reviewer
Pre Sales Architect at network techlab
Comprehensive web protection has secured public apps and supports advanced audit requirements
Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service has multiple valuable aspects. The WAF solution secures whatever public domains have been published by the public platform or internal servers exposed to public users. Firewalls have limitations, which is why I suggest using a WAF solution. The firewall provides the same features but in a limited edition. When discussing the SaaS platform or Layer 7 layer of security, you will receive multiple benefits. Firewalls have limitations with signatures, bot protection, and DOS protection. Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service is a dedicated WAF product that handles all DOS protection, bot protection, API security, endpoint connectivity, signature-based support, and top 10 OWASP support. Multiple features are available. AI and ML-based technology is available in almost every tool today. When discussing troubleshooting, there are AI models that will solve your problem and provide information. AI is helpful because it will give you proper information regarding errors and troubleshooting.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."
"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"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."
"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."
"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 provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"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."
"I rate the overall solution ten out of ten."
"The stability of the solution is excellent."
"Fortinet FortiWeb offers a variety of protections, including machine learning that helps protect web applications."
"The initial setup is pretty easy, and it is easier than for the on-premises solution."
"Regular updates are one of the aspects I appreciate about Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service, and it is provided by a leading brand in cybersecurity."
"Fortinet has created a holistic product that integrates features including AI and API protection, with straightforward automation and articulate reporting that even less experienced engineers can use easily."
"It is user-friendly and easy to work with."
"The technical support is really good."
 

Cons

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."
"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."
"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 reporting could be improved if it were more granular."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"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 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."
"It is expensive. Actually, it is expensive."
"What I think could be improved in the future is the inclusion of runtime application self-protection, as RASP is currently not part of the program, but it would be beneficial if that could be added into the FortiAP-S Cloud product."
"The only thing I encountered was related to integration, mostly concerning translation."
"To measure the success of Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service's services and reporting capability, there is one drawback."
"Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service could be improved with better logging capabilities, as many come with less spacing, necessitating a FortiSIM for enhanced functionality."
"The utilization of AI in Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service still needs to be upgraded and improved."
"While we find the solution to be really good overall, some improvements could be made to the alerting system, specifically around the health checks of endpoints."
"I do not have any notes on improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"It is not too pricey."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

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 Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
It is expensive. Actually, it is expensive. When discussing small organizations, I would not recommend it to them. I ...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
Currently, I want to add that Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service is offering only two-factor authentication. I ...
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
When discussing Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service, I always recommend it. Either I can recommend F5. Most user...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
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Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.