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F5 Silverline Managed Services vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
F5 Silverline Managed Services
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (14th)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (28th)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
DejanBlagojevic - PeerSpot reviewer
Mitigates more bot activity when defending web applications than any other vendor but comes at a price
F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it. We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.
Shashank N - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good stability, but the agent-based approach could be more convenient
The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF. Additionally, the agent-based approach presents challenges with managing agents across versions and dependencies on specific application platforms like Apache or NGINX, leading to compatibility issues and complexity in integration. This agent-based system proved particularly difficult to manage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The UI is good."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"Most vendors fulfill the requirements for standard DDoS protection, but F5 Silverline Managed Services has a better understanding of defending web applications like HTTP and can mitigate more bot activity than any other vendor."
"Its flexibility is the most valuable because it is a managed service. The good part is that you don't need to set it up. It just needs DNS routing, which is the easiest thing. Our client had Akamai for certain websites because they were using CDN features. They had NetScaler on the internal zone, F5 AWAFs on the data centers, and no WAF at all in the cloud. One of the main activities of the project was to move all these policies into a single WAF so that we could control and use that as a choke point. That exercise itself was very easy because it was a managed service and F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall does that for you. That's the best thing about F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall. It is easy to apply policies on-premises. If you have AWAF on-premises and you want to replicate some policies on F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, other than the policies that it applies by itself, it is easy because you have a team that supports it. F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works perfectly fine. It pretty much does everything that an Advanced WAF on-premises should do."
"The most valuable features are the configuration and configuring the process."
"The best advantage of F5 Silverline Managed Services is that it is easy to use."
"It's a good front end for public infrastructure"
"F5 technical support is really good."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is its cloud-native functionality and the high level of protection it provides."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"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."
"DNS Management."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."
"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better."
"Sometimes tech support can be slow. They take more time assigning engineers to complex issues, however, they resolve the issues by joining me to fix them."
"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."
"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by adding features that Palo Alto has."
"You need to have Linux knowledge in order to use the shell."
"The navigation is difficult to use."
"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."
"The UI is not very intuitive and could be better."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"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."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."
"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."
"The product’s pricing is reasonable."
"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Insurance Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
10%
Healthcare Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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...
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...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?
For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?
The solution is quite reasonably priced, with costs being lower in comparison to competitors. On a scale where ten is...
What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?
The pricing is very competitive compared to other providers. The pricing is definitely a factor in our decision-makin...
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
We do use it, but the UI can be improved as we mostly work through the CI/CD. It provides support, but sometimes it i...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,484 professionals have used our research since 2012.