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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

F5 Silverline Managed Services
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
15th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (5th)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
34th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 1.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is 1.2%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Silverline Managed Services1.5%
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)1.2%
Other97.3%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Sanchit Makkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Dns architect at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Robust protection has secured global web assets and keeps critical applications available
F5 Silverline Managed Services can be improved in areas with complex onboarding processes and slow deployment settings. Tuning of policy requires significant technical expertise, and there is a lack of knowledge in the F5 world where one needs to go through a steep learning curve in understanding what and how the policy should be configured for effectively protecting an application. These processes need to be streamlined.Knowing the limitations of F5 Silverline Managed Services, F5 has come out with a new product called F5 distributed cloud WAF platform, which has a better API integrated with security modules. It also offers advanced auto discovery, swagger, and open API validation, which is much better than Silverline.
reviewer2161107 - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Room for improvement with user interface while competitive pricing impresses
It is managed through Infrastructure as Code, so all configurations can be managed in the code itself, which is beneficial. Because it uses rules, it is easy to set up, and we have many different sites where the configurations are straightforward. Though the UI is not very interactive, which is a downside, we can manage many things. The UI is not very intuitive and could be better. However, we manage all the configurations through code, which is easy to maintain. It has extensive anomaly detection capabilities, so the traffic is classified into several categories where thresholds can be defined and customized based on false positives and false negatives. This is advantageous because you do not need to tweak it very often. Once you set it up, an audit once a quarter would suffice. 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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"My advice to others is this is a very reliable solution."
"What really stands out for me in terms of advantages of F5 Silverline Managed Services is that in a single cloud platform, I can protect my web applications against attacks."
"The most valuable features are the configuration and configuring the process."
"What I appreciate about F5 Silverline Managed Services is that it has multiple features, including unique iRules for traffic distribution that no other application provides, and F5's load balancing with iRules is the best since many companies do not utilize iRules."
"The stability of the solution is very good."
"The 30% efficiency improvement has definitely resulted in increased revenue for us, and with our website performing much better, I am able to achieve faster cycle times in terms of lead to conversion."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."
"The most important feature is that they have seven firewall protection, to protect our web servers."
"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."
"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."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
 

Cons

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can be improved in areas with complex onboarding processes and slow deployment settings."
"One negative aspect is that the product is expensive."
"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."
"Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles, optimization deployments, and compression profiles for better performance."
"One thing that was a hassle for us regarding F5 Silverline Managed Services was the deployment of this particular software."
"I just hope the price can be cheaper."
"The price is high in comparison to other products."
"We have complaints about the reliability of this solution."
"The UI is not very intuitive and could be better."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"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

"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."
"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 product’s pricing is reasonable."
"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise13
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?
My company has a business relationship with F5 Silverline Managed Services, as they charge based on services provided. The operational team handles project configuration. We mostly purchase F5 Silv...
What needs improvement with F5 Silverline Managed Services?
The disadvantages of F5 Silverline Managed Services in comparison to Radware include complexities in WAF technology and iRules, which are highly useful. Radware provides straightforward blocking WA...
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-making process.
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 is hard to navigate unless you are very familiar with it.
What is your primary use case for Signal Sciences?
The CDN is for caching and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is for protecting the servers from malicious traffic. They both perform different jobs and serve different purposes, ...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.