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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Orca Security comparison

 

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

F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in API Security
9th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
CDN (10th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (20th)
Orca Security
Ranking in API Security
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (10th), Container Security (10th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (8th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (2nd), AI Security (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the API Security category, the mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 5.3%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Orca Security is 5.8%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Orca Security5.8%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services5.3%
Other88.9%
API Security
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer2799597 - PeerSpot reviewer
Soc Analyst at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
Agentless cloud security has improved attack path visibility but still needs stronger real-time blocking
Yes, as per my experience, it has been very helpful. In our organization, we did not find any major or priority one kind of alerts or risks because we had a very good infrastructure structure and cybersecurity architecture built in our organization. Orca Security helped us find what vulnerabilities or gaps existed which we could improve within our architecture. It helped us in such a way that we used to close the open ports and only allowed internal IPs for necessity. For staging environments and for prod we had DOS protection. If network traffic showed that anybody was trying to flood our systems, we would only accept all and our client-related IPs or an approved list of vendor lists we would have. We would get to know where the gaps are and where the improvements we could make. Being an analyst class engineer, I could use my brain in those areas and it was very helpful to have Orca Security in my arsenal.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I appreciate Orca Security because I can see CSPM, KSPM, and DSPM, and it works with major security frameworks such as NIST and CIS, allowing me to see comprehensive insights on my cloud environment, with CI/CD integration and shift-left configuration that helps me improve cloud maturity and DevSecOps maturity as a complete CNAPP platform with the most capabilities to work with cloud security."
"The vulnerability management does not require network scanning or agent technology, so I don't need to modify any of my products in order to do vulnerability assessments."
"One of the valuable features of Orca Security is its design and options that allow flexible filtering and user-friendly visualization."
"Orca provides X-ray vision into everything within the cloud properties, whereas normally, this would require multiple tools."
"Orca's SideScanning is the biggest feature. It's the 'wow' factor... With Orca's SideScanning, they just need permissions for your account and that makes it so simple."
"Overall, I think Orca Security is the leader because of the strategic features I mentioned."
"Orca's dashboard is excellent. My team needs to be able to focus on specific areas for improvement in our cloud environment. And most recently, we've started to get good use out of sonar, the search capabilities, and the alert creation."
"The most valuable feature of Orca Security is the automated scanning tool, user-friendliness, and ease of use."
 

Cons

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"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 main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."
"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."
"In the future, I'd like to see Orca work better with third-party vendors. Specifically, being able to provide sanitized results from third parties."
"The presentation of the data in the dashboard is a little bit chaotic."
"Another improvement would be that, in addition to focusing on endpoint compliance, they would focus on general compliance."
"Orca needs improvement in snoozing or dismissing specific alarms."
"There were a couple of times when Orca was down when I was trying to access it. I work strange hours because all of my team is in the UK right now. It was 2 a.m. on a Saturday and I was trying to log in but it wasn't working. But relative to my other security tools, Orca is definitely the most stable that I've seen."
"We are PCI DSS compliant, so we need to scan our environment externally with tools vetted by the PCI DSS organization; Orca doesn't scan the environment externally and only scans what's currently in the cloud."
"I would like to see an option to do security checks on a code level. This is possible because they have access to all of the code running in the cloud provider, and combining their site-scanning solution with that would be a nice add-on."
"A few things could potentially be improved, particularly regarding false positives and the UI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Its license is a bit expensive."
"The most expensive solution is Palo Alto. They claim to be very robust. The next most expensive is Wiz, followed by Orca and all the rest."
"Orca is very competitive when compared to the alternatives and is not the most expensive in the market, that's for sure."
"Orca Security is cheaper compared to other solutions in the same space."
"While it's competitive with Palo Alto Prisma, I think Orca's list price is very high. I would advise Orca to lower it because, at that price, I might consider alternatives like Wiz, which also offers agentless services."
"Overall, the pricing is reasonable and the discounts have been acceptable."
"The price is a bit expensive for smaller organizations."
"Orca Security charges are based on cloud workloads. So, it's based on workloads. If we look at one feature, it might be expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four out of ten since it is not a cheap product.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed. Since 30 minutes of downtime is huge for applications, maintenance, it impa...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is being used for web application firewall along with API security, bot protection, and DDoS protection. There are two scenarios involving web applications and mobile ...
What do you like most about Orca Security?
It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just scan the entire assets in the cloud.
What needs improvement with Orca Security?
I think the downside of Orca Security is the reports. I don't have any good reports ready to deliver to an executive. If I need to deliver some reports to my account manager or an executive, I don'...
What is your primary use case for Orca Security?
I normally use Orca Security for AppSec, and one of the features that I use commonly is the application security. I love it because it's already covered in the same license, and I can get a good ov...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
BeyondTrust, Postman, Digital Turbine, Solarisbank, Lemonade, C6 Bank, Docebo, Vercel, and Vivino
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Orca Security and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.