Fastly vs Fortinet FortiWeb comparison

Fastly and Fortinet are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Fastly is ranked #23 with an average rating of 9.0, while Fortinet is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1. Fastly holds a 1.4% mindshare in WAF, compared to Fortinet’s 7.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Fastly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and Fortinet FortiWeb are both competitors in the web application security and performance optimization market. Fastly has an advantage in speed and simplicity, excelling in dynamic content delivery, while Fortinet FortiWeb is superior in comprehensive security capabilities, making it ideal for complex security requirements.

Features: Fastly provides a real-time CDN and edge cloud platform, allowing instant purging, origin shielding, and VCL configuration. Fortinet FortiWeb offers advanced threat protection, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and detailed analytics for attack prevention.

Room for Improvement: Fastly can enhance its focus on security to provide more comprehensive protection features similar to FortiWeb's offerings, which may include advanced threat detection and machine learning integrations. Fortinet FortiWeb can improve by simplifying its configuration and deployment processes and focusing on enhancing content delivery efficiency to match Fastly's speed.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly offers straightforward deployment and responsive customer support, ideal for businesses seeking quick setup. In contrast, Fortinet FortiWeb entails a more involved setup due to its advanced security features, but it offers extensive documentation and in-depth customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly's on-demand pricing model is cost-efficient for businesses prioritizing agility and speed, offering quicker ROI. Fortinet FortiWeb, with its higher initial setup cost, provides long-term ROI through security breach prevention, making it a valuable investment for security-focused enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

March 2026

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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 ...

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 Fastly is 1.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiWeb is 7.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiWeb	7.5%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.4%
Fastly	1.4%
Other	85.7%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

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.

Read full review

Patel Parth

Technical support engineer at Adobe

Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

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HameedAhmed

Joint Director at PAA

Security threats have been reduced through seamless deployment and strong integration with other tools

I have used Fortinet FortiWeb's integration features. We have easily integrated all of the applications with the product. Most of the applications we are using are in-house built. My technical team is looking after the best features. I have not used it extensively for maybe two and a half years. I have been involved in the installation, but I am not actually using the product. I work with it from time to time but not extensively. I would assess Fortinet FortiWeb's adaptive machine learning and artificial intelligence as having new patches installed regarding artificial intelligence, but when we bought it, I think the learning feature was there. Now they have installed artificial intelligence features through patches. We have a complete portfolio of Fortinet in our organization, including FortiMail, Fortinet FortiWeb, and FortiGate, along with multi-factor authentication. All of the products are from Fortinet. Fortinet tools integrate with each other and work in conjunction. I think Fortinet FortiWeb has helped us meet regulatory compliance because we are not a regulatory organization, but our sister organization is regulatory. We have regulatory compliance with the International Civil Aviation Authority, whose audit teams have checked our data center and these security products, and they are satisfied with us. The question about leveraging Fortinet FortiWeb's automated policy management does not pertain to my domain because I am not so technical, but I am in a management role now. My engineer is more technical than me. I would rate this product an eight point five out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."

"There is a huge signature repository"

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."

"The initial setup process is simple."

"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."

"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."

"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

More Fastly pros

"FortiNet shows me the health of the entire network."

"FortiWeb has a very extensive library of known attack signatures, which makes the product fit for any environment, regardless if the customer uses Windows-specific or non-Windows-specific applications."

"It helps us prevent attacks on servers."

"The most valuable feature is the tool's integration with load-balancing applications, similar to FortiADC. Its importance depends on customer requirements, such as whether they prioritize application load balancing or layer seven protection."

"I switched from SonicWALL to Fortinet; I am happier now."

"High-performance and detection engines, provide a high rate of exposure of web attacks."

"Before a platform faces the internet, Fortinet FortiWeb inspects the traffic."

"You have the ability to control everything from one single dashboard."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pros

Cons

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."

"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."

"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"Support is not that great."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

More Fastly cons

"The initial setup in our data center was somewhat complex."

"The stability is okay, sometimes. It could be more stable."

"The machine learning feature of the solution could be improved."

"We would like to know more about the integration with the hardware or security products, such as Gemalto, because we need to move to that point."

"The interface could have the interdependent elements arranged sequentially and wizards that go through most common deployment actions."

"For advanced users, it would be really useful to have access and the ability to manipulate packets. If we can access and manipulate the contents of packets, even encrypted packets... that would be powerful. Since we're looking at packets arriving at our network, we would have the private key to access those packets and their information."

"Fortinet FortiWeb could improve in reference architecture for different deployment scenarios."

"When you compare it with the F5 solution, FortiWeb is weak in detecting the Layer 7 DDoS attacks."

More Fortinet FortiWeb cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"The solution is expensive."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"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."

"It is not too pricey."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"FortiWeb has a good presence because of its price."

"The pricing is average; the product is neither particularly expensive nor affordable."

"There are no licensing costs."

"There's only one payment for the duration of the license. On a scale from one to five, I would rate pricing at four. I have not encountered any additional costs on my projects involving Fortinet FortiWeb."

"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."

"The cost isn't expensive."

"Previously, for each project, the cost was $800 to $1,000 per application. Now, it's $100 to $120. For some of the applications, there is a 90% reduction, and for some of the applications, there is a 50% reduction. We're paying only $500 to $600."

"It's an expensive solution, although there are no additional costs."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

10%

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	60
Midsize Enterprise	27
Large Enterprise	36

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Fastly?

I am using Fastly in the Adobe Commerce Cloud project. In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?

The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?

The pricing for Fortinet FortiWeb varies with different models having different prices. It depends on the requirement...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?

There is room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb. The team was only from FortiGate itself. They are making new firm...

See all answers

Comparisons

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

AWS WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

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Cloudflare vs Fastly

Compared 21% of the time

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 21% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 8% of the time

Uplynk vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Radware DDoS vs Fastly

Compared 2% of the time

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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 18% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 10% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiOS vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 5% of the time

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

March 2026

Download Fastly product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiWeb

March 2026

Download Fortinet FortiWeb product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

Fortinet FortiWeb is a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that protects your web applications and APIs from attacks targeting known as well as unknown vulnerabilities. As the surface of your web applications evolves with each change of existing features and deployment of new features, your APIs are left exposed. Fortinet FortiWeb provides the board protection capabilities required to protect web applications without sacrificing performance or manageability.

Fortinet FortiWeb is an automatic, advanced multi-layer solution that provides secure protection by discerning irregular behavior and distinguishing between malicious and benign anomalies. In addition, the approach delivers powerful bot mitigation capacities which authorize harmless bots to connect while blocking malicious bot activity securely. Regardless of where an application is hosted, Fortinet FortiWeb will safeguard business applications by providing deployment options, such as virtual machines, hardware appliances, and containers that can be deployed in the data center, cloud environments, or in the cloud-native SaaS solution.

Fortinet FortiWeb Features and Benefits

APIs and web applications have become integral to the rising demand for business-critical applications. Now more than ever, businesses are in need of an automatic firewall that will provide them with security, without sacrificing performance or reliability. Fortinet FortiWeb offers a variety of features and benefits, including:

Security fabric integration: FortiWeb integrates with other Fortinet solutions to provide advanced protection from persistent threats.
Proven web application and API protection: FortiWeb safeguards applications from all DDOS attacks, malicious bot attacks, and OWASP Top-10 threats.
Advanced visual analytics: FortiWeb offers a unique visual reporting tool that other WAF solutions don’t by providing a detailed analysis of attack elements and sources.
Hardware-based acceleration: With fast and secure traffic encryption and decryption, FortiWeb provides best-in-class WAF protection.
ML-based threat detection: FortiWeb delivers multi-layer machine learning defense protection to defend against zero-day attacks and reduce false positives.
False positive mitigation tools: Reduce daily management of policies through advanced tools to guarantee only unwanted traffic is blocked.

Reviews from Real Users

Fortinet FortiWeb offers an industry-leading Web Application Firewall, and users are satisfied with it for a number of reasons, including the ability to control everything from the dashboard and the PCI-compliant reports it offers.

Carlos P., director of business and digital transformation at SERNIVEL3, notes, "You have the ability to control everything from one single dashboard."

A director at a tech service company, says, "Banks have to be compliant with PCI and other things, and FortiWeb is absolutely amazing in terms of providing these reports. Otherwise, they will have to spend a lot of time on them."

Fortinet

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

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

Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

March 2026

Free Report: Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiWeb and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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