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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs IIS PHP Windows 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
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) (9th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (16th), API Security (8th)
IIS PHP Windows
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Application Server (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Distributed Cloud Services2.4%
Cloudflare15.0%
Akamai11.6%
Other71.0%
CDN
Application Server Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IIS PHP Windows0.7%
Tomcat12.6%
Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)9.8%
Other76.9%
Application Server
 

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.
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.
Gaurav-Bansal - PeerSpot reviewer
Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Hosting client blogs has become straightforward but resource usage still needs improvement
IIS PHP Windows has positively impacted my organization by helping to deploy customer websites that have very small budgets, allowing the organization to assist those clients, which builds trust with them. It enables the organization to help them run their small websites, and while some clients had bigger projects, they also wanted their small websites to run, such as a personal blog. Client satisfaction was high because a Windows server can be monitored, and the customer's websites could remain up and running all the time. If something happens and the application crashes, we could simply grab the logs from the event viewer to check memory limits and investigate what is happening. Additionally, the client could perform some of the management using the GUI management interface in IIS.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's a reasonably priced solution that meets customers' needs and it's not too difficult to deploy."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"Cloudflare makes it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple users and multiple clients, and basically go in and access their account, make the changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"It's a great product because it's scalable, has great coverage, and is mature with good defenses against DDoS attacks."
"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."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and 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."
"I appreciate the UI of F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the backend cost, alongside the actual value proposition that they provide with the load balancer, which is excellent."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"In my experience, the best features IIS PHP Windows offers include allowing us to host the PHP application with better performance compared to XAMPP, which we were previously using because XAMPP was giving slow performance."
"IIS PHP Windows impacts my organization positively because my applications perform very well here when compared with XAMPP."
"If you want to host your PHP or Laravel-based application in Windows, you can definitely use this extension, and using this extension you can host your PHP or Laravel application in IIS and it will have super speed."
"IIS PHP Windows has positively impacted my organization by helping to deploy customer websites that have very small budgets, allowing the organization to assist those clients, which builds trust with them."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"I think they have failed with their technical support."
"With CDN loads, sometimes we get an error that the host server is unavailable when the connection between CloudFlare and the server timed out."
"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"I rate technical support quite badly."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
"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."
"One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced."
"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."
"I chose a rating of seven out of ten because IIS PHP Windows is good for small enterprises with manageable aspects, but it has very high resource usage and requires a Windows server license, contributing to the overall cost."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"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."
"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 tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The price is reasonable."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
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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%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Construction Company
47%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

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 Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Large Enterprise2
 

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 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?
One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced.Specifically, ...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
My main use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services is WAF protection.I am using F5 Distributed Cloud Services primari...
What needs improvement with IIS PHP Windows?
IIS PHP Windows can be improved regarding its higher resource usage. Unlike a Linux web server that is very lightweig...
What is your primary use case for IIS PHP Windows?
My main use case for IIS PHP Windows is to deploy it for WordPress websites and Laravel custom applications so they c...
What advice do you have for others considering IIS PHP Windows?
Regarding IIS PHP Windows' security, I think its governance and security are solid as long as you configure Windows A...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

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