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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Radware Cloud WAF 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 ...
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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)
20th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
CDN (10th), API Security (9th)
Radware Cloud WAF Service
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Radware Cloud WAF Service is 2.2%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Radware Cloud WAF Service2.2%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall5.4%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services1.8%
Other90.6%
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.
AT
SOC Analyst at Adani Enterprises Ltd
Has significantly improved threat visibility and reduced false positives through intelligent bot detection and real-time analysis
The best features of Radware Cloud WAF Service that I prefer most include the bot protection. Its deployment was very smooth and flexible when I started deploying it. The reporting and visibility feature of the Bot Manager are noteworthy, as the dashboard gives clear insight into the traffic, activity, and block threats. The AI threat intelligence feature is quite impressive. In terms of blocking unknown threats and attacks, I assess Radware Cloud WAF Service as quite impressive; if I have to rate it out of 10, I would rate it eight and a half. The automated analytics for looking at events with Radware Cloud WAF Service is generally fine, and whenever we use it, it gives almost perfect results. In API protection with Radware Cloud WAF Service, we have multiple applications that we are using currently, and whenever there is any threat related to an API, it helps us provide detailed insight. Additionally, whenever there is unusual API traffic, it helps us monitor and detect threats.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."
"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and 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."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including 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."
"A favorite feature of the Radware Cloud WAF Service is the OWASP Top 10; this is the basic feature, and they are getting into AI, which makes it quite smart."
"With the Radware Cloud WAF Service, we have not faced any incidents in six years."
"The most valuable features of Radware Cloud WAF Service include its automation and learning capabilities for protection, as well as its superior bot mitigation."
"From a financial point of view, we no longer need to appropriate more horsepower to our backend web servers constantly to service these requests because Cloud WAF is preventing malicious bots from accessing our web page. It reduced the load on our backend."
"Radware Cloud WAF Service's ability to protect against zero-day attacks is very good; the threat intelligence feature is excellent in the WAF and helps us protect against zero-day threats significantly, notifying us as early as possible and helping us get it resolved."
"Radware Cloud WAF Service has improved our efficiency by about 95%."
"Radware Cloud WAF Service's Web DDoS protection, HTTP L7, has significantly helped us protect our customer networks, mitigating all types of web attacks and ensuring no fluctuations or leaks even when large numbers of malicious bot IPs are attacking our network."
"The API Discovery is also very good because the application is outsourced, which means that we don't have the code. API Discovery allowed me to discover precisely how to orchestrate the API so that I could see the results."
 

Cons

"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."
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"The reporting could be more granular."
"Its stability could be better."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"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."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"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."
"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."
"The connection between the front and back ends could be improved."
"The dashboard of Radware Cloud WAF Service could be more interactive and user-friendly."
"I'm not sure about how much historical traffic data we can access. Knowing the ability to view traffic from six months back would be beneficial for audit and compliance purposes, especially if an attack happens on an application."
"The dashboard needs improvement as some users find it complex."
"If we want to publish services to a limited number of providers and we only want those providers to connect, we need to forward those requests to the Radware support team and they apply them, but it takes some time."
"Radware does not have much online training available to help customers get the most out of this solution."
"Radware Cloud WAF Service should provide SSL certificates for its hosting customers."
"We received a notification where Radware Cloud WAF Service stopped working properly in our cloud environment without any prior notification."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not too pricey."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The solution is expensive."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
Information not available
"When compared to Akamai and F5, Radware's pricing and licensing are highly competitive."
"For the current market, the price for Radware Cloud WAF Service is exactly where we want it to be."
"We are paying $20,000 annually for six licenses that provide basic WAF functionality."
"The pricing is fair. We compared Radware to others using industry reviews and Radware is at the top right now."
"The pricing is fair."
"We are based in El Salvador and don't have a direct license with Radware; we purchase the license through resellers. The pricing is reasonable, as I managed an Akamai product in a previous position, and Cloud WAF is competitively priced."
"The price is a bulk average."
"We evaluated other options and, if I remember correctly, one of them was Fortinet, but they didn't seem as effective as Radware. But the price was the biggest difference. Radware had the best price for our type of network and level of scaling."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Government
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise40
 

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?
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...
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 obser...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Cloud WAF Service?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Radware Cloud WAF Service is good.
What needs improvement with Radware Cloud WAF Service?
In the starting mode, API Discovery was a little bit challenging for us, but after utilization and after day-to-day u...
What is your primary use case for Radware Cloud WAF Service?
For the WAF, in the last time I discussed with the Radware team only, we are searching for the API solution and all b...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Information Not Available
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Radware Cloud WAF Service and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.