F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Link11 comparison

F5 and Link11 are both solutions in the CDN category. F5 is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.0, while Link11 is ranked #19. F5 holds a 2.4% mindshare in CDN, compared to Link11’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Link11 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

Link11 and F5 Distributed Cloud Services are cyber defense solutions providing DDoS protection and network security, respectively. Link11 holds an advantage in pricing and support, while F5 Distributed Cloud Services leads with feature richness.

Features: Link11 includes advanced DDoS protection, real-time monitoring, and efficient threat detection. F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers broad cloud-computing capabilities, extensive network security features, and seamless integration with advanced scalability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Link11's deployment model is straightforward, supported by effective customer service, prioritizing ease of use. F5 Distributed Cloud Services presents a flexible deployment model with high-touch customer service, though more complex, it is offset by its comprehensive support structure.

Pricing and ROI: Link11 is appealing to budget-sensitive buyers with competitive setup costs and promising ROI. Despite higher initial expenses, F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers a potentially superior long-term ROI attributed to its advanced features, justifying its premium pricing.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11 Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11

May 2026

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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 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.4%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Link11 is 1.7%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare	16.4%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	2.4%
Link11	1.7%
Other	79.5%

CDN

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal

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.

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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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Shivendra S.

Senior Director of Engineering - Information Security at Apna

Offers flexibility with a kill switch for bypassing Reblaze if needed and provides a reliable Layer 7 defense against attacks

There is still some room for improvement when it comes to bot management from Reblaze because they are relatively new compared to other vendors in the town. AWS WAF, the Web Application Firewall from AWS, has a vast database of bad IP addresses due to its long-standing presence in this business. Reblaze, being a new entrant, is still building its database of bad IP addresses and malicious systems. So, Reblaze needs to work on that aspect. But other than that, I don't think scaling Reblaze has been an issue. There were some initial glitches, but they were all sorted out. So currently, I would say that the bot management and the database are areas they should focus on for further improvement.

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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

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

"The UI is good."

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"Cloudflare has positively impacted our organization by giving us flexibility to manage the DNS part, being quite fast, and allowing us to manage everything from a single dashboard, which is quite handy."

"The technical support on offer is excellent; they are very helpful and responsive, and we are quite happy with the level of service they provide to their customers."

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"It is a highly resilient product that can handle significantly larger workloads and high volumes of traffic with ease."

"Reblaze has definitely saved us money; we have estimated that it saves up to €500,000 a year."

"The best thing about Reblaze, for us, is that it has been a game changer because previously, we were using Google's Web Application Firewall, but it wasn't up to the mark."

"I very much like the elastic search and reports, allowing us to have a 360-degree view of the customer's activities and enabling us to track down any suspicious bots."

"The technical support is quite good, as soon as you have an issue you call or send an email and they respond very quickly, and they also provide you with contact details of the CEO."

"Reblaze has saved us money by optimizing server usage and blocking malicious bots."

"The feature I find most valuable is the user-friendly dashboard, as it is easy to understand how everything works and it allows you to make decisions quickly and efficiently."

"The most valuable features were the real-time monitoring and the management. With this kind of product, you need a very good management system to allow you to see false positives in real-time; to see what's happening in real-time... The clarity stood out. It was very visible and very easy to navigate; very easy to find the data we were looking for."

Cons

"We experienced some downtime in the fall of 2013, causing us to switch to Incapsula."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."

"Latencies are always a problem."

"I would like to not need a separate server for non-www redirection under the CNAME setup option."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."

"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 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."

"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."

"The next release should have next-generation automation."

"We have multiple products behind different instances of Reblaze. We have one instance for staging and then we have a production instance for multiple products. One of the things that we have requested is a unified view panel, so that we can see each of the instances in a unified view. That way, we won't have to go bouncing from instance to instance."

"They have an interface that you have to adjust to. That is a bit of a downfall because I expect an interface to be very intuitive for someone who knows little about security. But if you know about security, the interface is wonderful."

"The WAF features are not as granular as we would expect from a WAF system. There should be more granularity and in-depth rules, out-of-the-box."

"The interface on the dashboard could be improved. Some of the settings are confusing which makes things difficult when you're trying to get a handle on the product."

"Perhaps the automatic reporting could be better. I would like to have seen more automated reports."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"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."

"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 cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

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

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"There is still some room for improvement when it comes to bot management from Reblaze because they are relatively new compared to other vendors in the town."

"I believe that for the six instances we have right now, it's costing us $16,000 per month."

"On a monthly basis we pay $750."

"We found the cost to be a bit on the higher side, starting at approximately three to four thousand dollars for a small configuration."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Construction Company

Performing Arts

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	26

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	2

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...

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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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?

The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...

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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.

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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...

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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...

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services

May 2026

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Buyer's Guide

Link11

May 2026

Download Link11 product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Reblaze

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

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.

Link11, headquartered in Germany, offers cloud-based IT security services designed to prevent business disruptions, enhancing cyber resilience for IT networks and critical applications globally. Their services benefit industries across Europe, North America, and Asia with comprehensive protection.

Link11 provides a range of security and performance solutions, including Network Security, Web Application & API Protection, and Application Performance solutions. Their offerings encompass Network DDoS protection and an all-in-one WAAP solution, featuring Web Application Firewall, Web DDoS Protection, Bot Management, API Protection, and Secure CDN & DNS. A high-performance global network, monitored 24/7 by the Link11 Security Operations Center, ensures robust defense mechanisms.

What are the key features of Link11?

User-friendly dashboard simplifies monitoring and management.
Real-time monitoring provides instant visibility into potential threats.
Advanced DDoS protection safeguards against various attack vectors.
API integration enhances mobile app security.
Comprehensive bot management includes ATO and botnet blocking.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Seamless security management supported by dedicated customer support channels.
Efficient rule creation and prioritization streamline security workflows.
Continuous improvements in filtering against SQL and script injections enhance security.
Effective activity monitoring provides alerts on suspicious activities.

Link11 is suited for industries wanting to protect web applications against Layer 7 DDoS attacks, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and phishing attempts. Deployed on cloud models, Link11 integrates as a fundamental security layer, offering effective bot management and securing websites with multiple technologies.

Link11

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Information Not Available

CBC, Hermes, Gartner

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11

May 2026

Free Report: F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11 and other solutions. Updated: May 2026.

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