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F5 Rules for AWS WAF vs Fastly 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
F5 Rules for AWS WAF enhanced security, reduced manual efforts, decreased malicious traffic, and improved application performance with ROI benefits.
Sentiment score
6.0
Fastly boosts return on investment with improved performance, reduced latency, and cuts infrastructure costs by 40-60%.
I observed around 35 to 45% reduction in malicious application layer traffic reaching the origin, which helped protect the backend systems and reduce risk exposure.
Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems
One measurable benefit was a reduction in manual effort required for managing and tuning web application protection policies because the managed rule capabilities and centralized visibility simplified the day-to-day operations.
Senior Technical Consultant at a tech consulting company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I did see a return on my investment with F5 Rules for AWS WAF because I was able to detect attacks earlier, and because of this, my resources were not scaling continuously, thus saving costs on resources.
Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
Realizing a 30 to 50% reduction in latency and page load time, ensuring users experience a seamless workflow.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
I have seen a return on investment, particularly in time savings, especially regarding the changes.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.9
F5 Rules for AWS WAF have positive customer service, but users desire quicker solutions and more proactive recommendations.
Sentiment score
6.3
Fastly's customer care is efficient with multi-channel support, but has inconsistencies in response times and transparency across time zones.
They clearly explained what the best options are based on my use case, which helped us shortlist what is required.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
The support team generally demonstrates strong technical knowledge around application security and traffic management, along with the AWS integrations.
Senior Technical Consultant at a tech consulting company with 5,001-10,000 employees
For critical issues, the response time is quite good, and the support teams are knowledgeable in handling rule tuning, false positives, and other security-related incidents.
Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems
demonstrating the team's technical expertise in CDN and Edge architecture
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
We have SLAs defined because we opted for enterprise support pricing.
Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
F5 Rules for AWS WAF provides scalable, cloud-native security, managing traffic spikes efficiently without compromising performance or requiring manual adjustments.
Sentiment score
6.4
Fastly is praised for scalability, ease of growth support, cloud flexibility, excellent support, and successful global integrations.
In my experience, F5 Rules for AWS WAF handles traffic spikes and high request volumes efficiently, including during attack scenarios such as bot surges or application layer attacks.
Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems
Easily handling traffic spikes and high-volume attacks without any manual intervention.
Cloud DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It supports scaling without significantly affecting application performance even during high traffic periods or sudden spikes in requests.
Senior Technical Consultant at a tech consulting company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Seamlessly handling massive traffic without requiring backend changes due to its globally distributed Edge network and stateless API-driven design.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.6
F5 Rules for AWS WAF offers reliable performance, seamless integration, and minimal intervention, outperforming native AWS rules in effectiveness and coverage.
Sentiment score
7.3
Fastly is stable and reliable with high uptime, no technical issues, and strong performance in enterprise applications.
F5 Rules for AWS WAF is consistently updated and applied without impacting application availability, and it handles high traffic volumes effectively, even during attack scenarios.
Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems
Especially in terms of policy enforcement, traffic inspection, and integration with AWS environments.
Senior Technical Consultant at a tech consulting company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Providing comprehensive managed rules coverage and reducing operational overhead compared to the AWS native managed rules.
DGM at Airtel Digital
Highly reliable for enterprise-scale applications with high uptime guarantees.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
 

Room For Improvement

Users want simpler tuning, AI-driven optimization, better documentation, cloud integration, reduced costs, and improved reporting for AWS WAF.
Fastly requires improvements in China presence, configuration complexity, pricing, customer support, security features, documentation, and bot detection.
To stay safer from a security perspective, continuous improvisation in these security rules is required to ensure we are always up to date with new attacks.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
The most useful change for F5 Rules for AWS WAF would be rule-level allow listing and exception management.
Senior Technical Lead QA at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Fine-tuning it to match specific application behavior can sometimes be complex and time-consuming, especially for teams without deep WAF expertise.
Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems
I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Setup Cost

F5 Rules for AWS WAF offers cost-effective advanced protection and easy integration, justifying its premium over basic sets.
Fastly is competitively priced with usage-based costs and customizable options, but some find it expensive with a learning curve.
It has competitive pricing.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
There is no significant setup cost involved, as it is a managed service that can be quickly integrated into the existing AWS WAF configuration without additional infrastructure.
Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems
F5 Rules for AWS WAF is not very costly and is reasonable, with enterprises being able to afford the cost.
Cloud DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It operates on a pay-as-you-go structure, but costs scale with traffic, requiring monitoring to avoid unexpected spikes based on data transfers and the number of requests handled.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
In terms of price, I find it good.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

F5 Rules for AWS WAF offers advanced threat mitigation, customizable security, and seamless AWS integration for enhanced protection and efficiency.
Fastly CDNs integrate with Signal Sciences WAF for efficient content delivery, enhancing performance with global edge locations and code management.
Now, looking at these rule sets, they ensure that our origin or our application content and code, as well as the application itself or its API, are secure enough, always.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
F5 Rules for AWS WAF rule sets are highly effective in detecting and mitigating OWASP Top 10 attacks such as SQL injection, XSS, and command injection, which significantly strengthens application security.
Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems
Using F5 Rules for AWS WAF has positively impacted my organization by making our AI-integrated application more secure from bot attacks, restricted size bodies, automated rate blocking for DDoS, and managed rules, especially as security has become a common concern across the industry.
Cloud DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The best feature that Fastly offers is the Edge location, which reduces latency, making our applications work smoother because we do not have to constantly call the backend.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
Fastly has a wide number of configuration features that can be performed, and I emphasize that they can be done from code, which makes it much more traceable.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and WAF, web application firewall, additionally image optimization.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Categories and Ranking

F5 Rules for AWS WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Business Rules Management (3rd)
Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
24th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Rules for AWS WAF is 0.4%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.2%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Rules for AWS WAF0.4%
Fastly2.2%
Other97.4%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Vibin Thomas - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Team Lead - Content Security at Valuepoint Systems
Advanced protection has reduced web attacks and improves application performance and operations
One area where F5 Rules for AWS WAF can be improved is in simplifying the tuning process. While F5 Rules for AWS WAF is powerful, fine-tuning it to match specific application behavior can sometimes be complex and time-consuming, especially for teams without deep WAF expertise. Another improvement could be enhanced visibility and reporting. Although AWS WAF provides logs, having more intuitive and built-in dashboards or clearer categorization of rule triggers would make it easier to quickly identify and analyze attack patterns. Additionally, expanding the capabilities around bot management and behavior analysis would be beneficial compared to some dedicated bot management solutions. More advanced detection techniques could further strengthen the protection against sophisticated automated traffic. Finally, providing more predefined templates or best practice recommendations for different application types would help speed up the deployment and reduce the initial configuration effort.
Pranay Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
Edge caching has transformed response times and delivers faster candidate data globally
Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users. A more user-friendly, UI-based configuration could simplify the experience, alongside better templates for common use cases and dashboard improvements, as the current dashboard feels complex for beginners, and pricing can be hard to predict for smaller companies. I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities. However, VCL complexity and pricing predictability, especially for smaller companies, along with a user-friendly dashboard are areas impacting my score.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
33%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Computer Software Company
6%
Energy/Utilities Company
5%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for F5 Rules for AWS WAF was good with purchasing and the setup cost.
What needs improvement with F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
The additional costs for F5 Rules for AWS WAF are quite high, as F5 managed rules require a separate subscription on top of the standard AWS WAF charges; it would be great if it would be pre-integr...
What is your primary use case for F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
F5 Rules for AWS WAF manages the security rule set by applying the rules and setting the block directly in AWS WAF to provide advanced protection against web application attacks, bots, threats, and...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?
In terms of price, I find it good, and as I mentioned, the implementation cost had some difficulty at the beginning due to the learning curve.
What needs improvement with Fastly?
I think Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples so that it is easier for developers, since at the beginning it becomes a bit complicated.
What is your primary use case for Fastly?
My primary use case for Fastly is using it as a CDN to speed up my customers' access to the applications. A specific example of how Fastly has helped improve my customers' access to the application...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Rules for AWS WAF vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.