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F5 Rules for AWS WAF vs IBM Operational Decision Manager 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 Rules for AWS WAF
Ranking in Business Rules Management
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (29th)
IBM Operational Decision Ma...
Ranking in Business Rules Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Complex Event Processing (CEP) (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2783919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Managed security rules have protected our public e‑commerce sites and simplified ongoing defense
I advise anyone looking for a great tool to secure their public-facing applications to start using F5 Rules for AWS WAF. These are managed rule sets, so you do not need to worry about continuous improvements or ensuring your application is secure; F5 Rules for AWS WAF will take care of that and is always making the necessary improvements in these rule sets to ensure security. I am very impressed with the rule sets and the continuous engineering from their security team to ensure the required rule set availability. I really appreciate the fantastic job they are doing. F5 Rules for AWS WAF can be integrated with AWS CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, Lambda, and API Gateway. I am satisfied with all these services as they are our intermediary points for services exposed to the public or globally. I gave this product a rating of ten out of ten.
Bhasker ReddyPIdintla - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Delivery Head at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The solution provides an efficient, comprehensive way to manage polices for all the applications.
We use ODM to set complex business rules. For instance, we deploy this solution for most of our banking customers because there are frequent changes in the policies and business rules. These are complex to manage for enterprise applications.  ODM provides an efficient, comprehensive way to manage…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I advise anyone looking for a great tool to secure their public-facing applications to start using F5 Rules for AWS WAF."
"I advise anyone looking for a great tool to secure their public-facing applications to start using F5 Rules for AWS WAF."
"F5 Rules for AWS WAF has positively impacted our organization for security through the implementation of traffic rules in our application."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Its ability to untangle hard coded rules and put them in a more manageable structure."
"The business owns the rules and they're taken away from IT, so business doesn't need to ask IT to implement them, and IT doesn't need to implement them. So the business owns their decisions and their rules, and therefore, finally, they take proper ownership, and model and maintain them properly."
"I like the fact that I don't have to deal with business rules, and then our business partners deal with it. I'm a developer, so I don't have to deal with that kind of stuff. I just make the code, then our business people take care of the business side. It's a great split."
"With ODM as a centralized rules engine, it's easy to track. You can version the rules in the ODM engine itself."
"ODM has probably been one of the more stable IBM products I have used."
"It reduces operating costs because you are taking some of this work out of the high cost IT people, freeing them up to work on new initiatives and getting them out of maintenance mode. Now, the business people are the ones making business decisions on what needs to change. They are hands on making these changes."
"So far, the usability is great. It's also easy to set up."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement I see is that while everything is in good shape, I demand continuous improvisation of these rule sets."
"It's too early to talk about a return on investment with F5 Rules for AWS WAF."
"An area for improvement I see is that while everything is in good shape, I demand continuous improvisation of these rule sets."
"Extracting specific rules could be better. We've had to do a lot of custom work on that. The testing, we've played a little bit with it, but we have our own testing methods. If it could be as simple as we have for our custom work, that would be great."
"I think there should be a facility for business to really create rules from scratch. The only part for IT should be to make sure the platform is stable, the technology platform, but everything else, the business should be able to create those rules."
"The only thing we have trouble with is integrating IBM ODM with the cloud. The product is on-prem, and we need to migrate the rules to the cloud. It's a hectic process."
"The errors I get from time to time are not easy to debug or easy to understand. They are very vague because if a XOM file is missing or there is a deserialization problem, on the client's side I only get a 500 Internal Server Error. To learn where the problem is, I have to go on the Rule Execution Server and test it myself. The deserialization issue is very vague. The error messages should be more straightforward and easy to understand."
"It hasn't totally helped our decision-making."
"The solution's licensing cost needs improvement."
"ODM could be improved with better integration with other platforms."
"I would like to have integration of the user interfaces, and they are putting them together in the next version of the solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We have a client who had a three-month ROI on this tool, just in additional sales, from sort of the next best action of what product that they should offer to their clients. ROI can be very quick with this product."
"It will definitely improve the cash flow of our clients, thereby it will improve the cash flow to us."
"ODM's pricing could be more competitive as there are open-source business rules engines that are becoming standard."
"We made a lifetime purchase. We purchased it by number of PVUs for our stage and product environments."
"It is an expensive solution."
"It was not a large cost. It was a one-time cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
25%
Insurance Company
13%
Healthcare Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
From the pricing perspective, I found it to be comparable to other marketplace rules available in AWS Marketplace. It has competitive pricing.
What needs improvement with F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
An area for improvement I see is that while everything is in good shape, I demand continuous improvisation of these rule sets. However, I am accepting of this. To stay safer from a security perspec...
What is your primary use case for F5 Rules for AWS WAF?
We are providing support to our end customers who have e-commerce websites that need to be exposed to the public, and for a secure way around, we thought of getting them exposed via the Application...
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Also Known As

No data available
IBM Operational Decision Management, ILOG JRules, IBM ODM, IBM WebSphere Business Events
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Odyssey Transportation & Logistics Corporation, Swiss Customs, Athletes' Performance, L_elo, Versicherungskammer Bayern
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Rules for AWS WAF vs. IBM Operational Decision Manager and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.