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Fastly vs NGINX App Protect comparison

 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.0
Fastly boosts return on investment with improved performance, reduced latency, and cuts infrastructure costs by 40-60%.
Sentiment score
5.8
NGINX App Protect offers notable ROI, enhancing security, integrating with CICD pipelines, and providing compliance and time-saving benefits.
Reducing infrastructure costs by 40 to 60% because Edge Caching minimizes backend traffic, resulting in lower computing costs.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
I have seen a return on investment, particularly in time savings, especially regarding the changes.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.3
Fastly's customer care is efficient with multi-channel support, but has inconsistencies in response times and transparency across time zones.
Sentiment score
5.8
NGINX App Protect's support is reliable and helpful, though costs and occasional delays affect accessibility for some users.
demonstrating the team's technical expertise in CDN and Edge architecture
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
We have SLAs defined because we opted for enterprise support pricing.
Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would describe Fastly's customer support as fast and efficient when I have had to use it.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
They were quick and efficient when we had issues.
Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the customer support a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Tech Lead at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.4
Fastly is praised for scalability, ease of growth support, cloud flexibility, excellent support, and successful global integrations.
Sentiment score
6.1
NGINX App Protect offers strong scalability praised by users, despite challenges with policy limits and deployment delays.
Seamlessly handling massive traffic without requiring backend changes due to its globally distributed Edge network and stateless API-driven design.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
The scalability of NGINX App Protect is good and open source at its best.
Tech Lead at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Fastly is stable and reliable with high uptime, no technical issues, and strong performance in enterprise applications.
Sentiment score
8.4
Users praise NGINX App Protect's stability and reliability, outperforming competitors, handling high traffic efficiently, and receiving high ratings.
Highly reliable for enterprise-scale applications with high uptime guarantees.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
It is a quality solution, and I would rate its stability as eight out of ten.
IT Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Fastly requires improvements in China presence, configuration complexity, pricing, customer support, security features, documentation, and bot detection.
NGINX App Protect needs enhancements in automation, UI, security, performance, and support, with complex setup and integration issues.
I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
For now, I think NGINX App Protect is good, but maybe I would like to see the logging feature added.
Dev Ops Engineer at BARQ Systems
There was more information from F5 regarding hardware requirements and specifications to deploy the service.
IT Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The GUI and web GUI configuration could be improved to be easier to manage and use.
Dev Ops Engineer at adesso AG
 

Setup Cost

Fastly is competitively priced with usage-based costs and customizable options, but some find it expensive with a learning curve.
NGINX App Protect offers reasonable annual pricing, ranging from $25,000 to $400,000, aligning with industry-leading solutions.
It operates on a pay-as-you-go structure, but costs scale with traffic, requiring monitoring to avoid unexpected spikes based on data transfers and the number of requests handled.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
In terms of price, I find it good.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Fastly CDNs integrate with Signal Sciences WAF for efficient content delivery, enhancing performance with global edge locations and code management.
NGINX App Protect provides comprehensive security features including automation, real-time threat detection, DDoS protection, and flexible deployment options.
Fastly has a wide number of configuration features that can be performed, and I emphasize that they can be done from code, which makes it much more traceable.
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Initially, we faced load time issues, but after deploying Fastly and optimizing our queries, we achieved a response time cut to less than 1 millisecond from an initial 3 to 4 seconds.
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and WAF, web application firewall, additionally image optimization.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
The most valuable feature is the ability to operate in a DevOps environment and to be configured through API and pipeline by the developers themselves.
IT Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Some threats like injection and running scripts, SQL injections, these all get stopped and rejected by the server.
Dev Ops Engineer at BARQ Systems
Detecting bots and blocking IPs have proven effective for securing applications.
Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
24th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (11th)
NGINX App Protect
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
19th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (28th), API Security (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Fastly is 2.2%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX App Protect is 2.1%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NGINX App Protect2.1%
Fastly2.2%
Other95.7%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Pranay Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior software engineer at Simplifyvms
Edge caching has transformed response times and delivers faster candidate data globally
Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users. A more user-friendly, UI-based configuration could simplify the experience, alongside better templates for common use cases and dashboard improvements, as the current dashboard feels complex for beginners, and pricing can be hard to predict for smaller companies. I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities. However, VCL complexity and pricing predictability, especially for smaller companies, along with a user-friendly dashboard are areas impacting my score.
Valerio Guaglianone - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at adesso AG
Long-term web protection has supported reliable traffic management but needs a simpler interface
NGINX App Protect is a good product. I have used both versions from F5 -also the free version- (I mean the NGINX/NGINX One/App Protect free trial period), and I think it is a good product. It's stable, affordable, and easy to manage. NGINX App Protect is a comprehensive security solution that combines advanced WAF, DoS protection, API security, and DevSecOps automation in a lightweight, scalable package ideal for modern cloud-native architectures. The adaptive machine learning capabilities are truly commendable, as the solution can establish traffic baselines and detect anomalies in real time. It automatically adjusts security policies, minimizing the need for manual intervention and reducing false positives. Additionally, it supports scalable deployment across diverse environments, including on-premises, cloud, Kubernetes, and containers, offering both flexibility and scalability I have experience with the web server, F5 load balancer, and similar products provided by Ergon, for eg. the web application firewall and the Microgateway for K8S. I'm also familiar with F5 BIG-IP products.
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?
In terms of price, I find it good, and as I mentioned, the implementation cost had some difficulty at the beginning due to the learning curve.
What needs improvement with Fastly?
I think Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples so that it is easier for developers, since at the beginning it becomes a bit complicated.
What is your primary use case for Fastly?
My primary use case for Fastly is using it as a CDN to speed up my customers' access to the applications. A specific example of how Fastly has helped improve my customers' access to the application...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?
I will not be able to answer about my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for NGINX App Protect, as something different handles that in my team.
What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?
I did not face any issues with NGINX App Protect. The only issue that we had is that someone was trying to install the POC for the customer, and he by mistake installed the Instance Manager on the ...
What is your primary use case for NGINX App Protect?
I have been dealing with NGINX App Protect and the WAF policy. I usually recommend NGINX App Protect for banking and telecom, and for anyone that has their own database or servers that they host we...
 

Also Known As

No data available
NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.