No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Fastly vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

Sponsored
 

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 Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
22nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 1.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is 4.1%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.7%
Microsoft Azure Application Gateway4.1%
Fastly1.5%
Other89.7%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
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.
PP
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.
SS
Cloud Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Mutual TLS has secured our web services and now needs broader protocol support
The most valuable feature we have found in Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is mutual TLS. We find mutual TLS valuable because we can verify the client securely by setting up the trust certificate of the client, and also if we do it at the client side as well. This successfully develops mutual trust, ensuring that we know the client who is calling our service is a legitimate client. That is a very nice feature.Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has helped manage our traffic efficiently because we have many web services that we can put behind the same URL, and we can have different URLs with the same Application Gateway with a limited number of listeners. We can do host-based routing as well as URL-based routing or path-based routing. It supports both, so we can have even a single URL supporting many applications, or we can have different URLs for different applications respectively. We have both use cases.

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."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."
"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"It has a filter available, although we are not currently using it because it is not part of our requirements, but it is a good option and when it becomes part of our requirements we will definitely use it."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the web application firewall (WAF)."
"The solution's integration is very good."
"The simplicity of the solution and its ability to integrate easily with others are its most valuable aspects."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway are the policies, the data store they are using, and the cloud platform it operates on."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway are the policies, the data store they are using, and the cloud platform it operates on."
"I find Application Gateway’s WAF module valuable because it helps prevent layer 7 attacks."
"WAF feature replicates the firewall."
 

Cons

"The reporting could be more granular."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Support is not that great."
"The tool is a pain to deal with when it comes to the area of configuration."
"The product's performance should be better."
"It could be easier to change servicing."
"The support that they provide could be faster."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has room for improvement because it offers many features, but its configuration is a bit difficult, at least from the developer point of view."
"The support can be improved when you are configuring the system rules. The Disaster Recovery feature can be added in the next release. The price of the solution can be reduced a bit."
"Overall, it just wasn't a great product. It was lacking in a lot of areas."
"The solution doesn’t support wildcard-based and regular expression-based rules."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The solution is expensive."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"It is not too pricey."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"Every solution comes with a license and cost. Microsoft provides the license and the total cost is for the maintenance every year."
"The solution is reasonably priced compared to other solutions."
"The solution is paid monthly. The solution is highly expensive."
"There is some additional cost, such as extended support."
"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."
"The product is not expensive."
"The pricing is based on how much you use the solution."
"Regarding pricing for Azure Application Gateway, I would rate it at seven."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
886,011 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
 

Overview

 

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
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
886,011 professionals have used our research since 2012.