Fastly vs NGINX App Protect comparison

Fastly and F5 are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Fastly is ranked #17 with an average rating of 8.5, while F5 is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.7. Additionally, 100% of Fastly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and NGINX App Protect are competitive solutions in the web performance and security category. Fastly holds the upper hand when it comes to rapid content delivery, while NGINX App Protect shines with its strong application security features.

Features: Fastly offers a robust edge cloud platform optimizing content delivery and scalability, supporting real-time data streaming and instant configurability. It provides a user-friendly CLI for efficient configuration and reliable log management. NGINX App Protect provides advanced threat mitigation for APIs and microservices, excelling in auto-learning for application profiling, bot protection, and flexibility with command-line interface and reverse proxy.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could enhance zero-trust security features and improve its broader market appeal. Advanced analytics and a more comprehensive CDN interface could bolster its standing. NGINX App Protect may require simplification in its setup process. Emphasizing ease of backend programming could improve deployment. Integration advice for hybrid networks could also be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly ensures seamless deployment with comprehensive documentation and responsive customer support. It integrates effortlessly with existing systems, promoting minimal downtime. NGINX App Protect focuses on security integration but might require more customization. It needs effective communication between security and developer teams to achieve optimal deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly offers competitive pricing focused on performance improvement, ensuring good ROI through enhanced speed. NGINX App Protect generally has higher initial costs due to its security features, providing substantial ROI for security-focused businesses. Fastly is cost-effective for performance needs, while NGINX App Protect secures long-term investments in application protection.

To learn more, read our detailed Fastly vs. NGINX App Protect Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. NGINX App Protect

April 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

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Saurav Kumar

Senior security architecture at National Payment Corporation Of India

Offers protection to users from external threats

NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight 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 most valuable feature is its usability."

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"The tool is user-friendly."

More Cloudflare pros

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

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

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

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

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

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

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"Overall, I rate NGINX App Protect between eight and nine."

"The most valuable feature is that I can establish different services from the firewall."

"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working."

"I tested specific features and evaluated the solution against the Web Application Firewall. I conducted research to test different detection percentages. I did not use it directly for protection but for evaluation purposes."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."

"It's very easy to deploy."

"It has the best documentation features."

"The initial setup was simple and took three to four days."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"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."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

"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."

"Support is not that great."

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

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

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."

"The product's user interface is an area with shortcomings as it can be quite confusing for users, making it an area where improvements are required."

"It doesn't have more advanced features like no false-positive security, which you can configure in Advanced WAF."

"Its technical support could be better."

"The setup of NGINX App Protect is complex. The full process took one week to complete. Additionally, we had to change the network infrastructure platform which took one month."

"It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput."

"NGINX App Protect would be improved with integration with Shape and F5 WAF, which would make it easy for users to manage all their web application security with a single solution."

"It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requirements and specifications to deploy the service, to avoid disruptions after implementation."

More NGINX App Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"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."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The price is reasonable."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"It is an expensive solution."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

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

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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

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

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."

"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."

"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."

"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."

"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."

"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."

"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...

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?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX App Protect?

It's very easy to deploy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?

I don't know the pricing yet because in my other project, I was not part of the buying side and I was just starting t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requir...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 20% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Edgio vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 22% of the time

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 18% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 15% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 8% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

April 2025

Download Fastly product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

April 2025

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“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.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

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

NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
Complying with security and regulatory requirements

NGINX App Protect offers:

Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

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

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. NGINX App Protect

April 2025

Free Report: Fastly vs. NGINX App Protect

Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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