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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
18th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (12th)
NGINX App Protect
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (21st), API Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Fastly is 1.5%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX App Protect is 1.8%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Tomaz Sobczak - PeerSpot reviewer
Signature-based detection, DOS protection, and bot protection
NGINX App Protect is easier to automate and configure, or manage from an API. This is good for securing applications. However, it's not suitable for more complex tasks. NGINX App Protect positively impacted performance changes. There's a cache or it works like a proxy, so it can speed up applications. It can also offload some functions from servers, which NGINX can handle faster.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"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."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"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 most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found."
"Overall, I rate NGINX App Protect between eight and nine."
"The stability of the product is very impressive since it handles 60,000 to 70,000 requests or transactions per second."
"WAF is useful to track mitigation, inclusion, prevention, and the parametric firewall."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the OWASP certification. Additionally, the tool's ability to enforce strong passwords and OTP within minutes is impressive. With its analytics and recommendations, it is a very good solution."
"The policies are flexible based on the technologies you use."
"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working."
"There's a cache, or it works like a proxy, so it can speed up applications."
 

Cons

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"Support is not that great."
"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."
"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."
"The integration of NGINX App Protect could improve."
"NGINX App Protect could improve security."
"Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time."
"The solution needs to be improved in the e-commerce portal."
"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."
"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."
"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."
"The dashboard could provide a more comprehensive view of the status of the connections."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."
"The product's price is high."
"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."
"NGINX is not expensive."
"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."
"There are no additional fees."
"NGINX App Protect is expensive."
"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.
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 customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is ve...
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 to look at options.
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 requirements and specifications to deploy the service, to avoid disruptions after impl...
 

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: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.