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Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF...
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (28th)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Lilian Blaitt - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficiently identifies and addresses vulnerabilities while providing robust protection
It is a secure tool. It is user-friendly and easy to work with. It is possible to easily find vulnerabilities with the WAF. I understand that the return is good since I haven't had any significant attacks. The vulnerabilities I found were easy to close. I think the return is good. It is a good tool.
Shehzad Ali - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers time and cost savings with integration, but user interface needs improvement
We are using it for our internal application development. We are testing those features of application gateways. We are integrating it with our solutions, application, Azure Application Gateway Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well. It provides a range of services, so it…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"I rate the overall solution ten out of ten."
"The technical support is really good."
"The stability of the solution is excellent."
"The company provides technical support, and they are mostly available 24/7."
"It is user-friendly and easy to work with."
"Fortinet FortiWeb offers a variety of protections, including machine learning that helps protect web applications."
"It is a secure tool."
"The solution integrates different applications and APIs securely, enhancing overall security and network optimization."
"The solution provides great automation and it is easy to upgrade service."
"It is a scalable solution...The installation phase of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is very easy."
"Good customization; able to report and take action on alerts."
"The solution's integration is very good."
"The most valuable feature is WAF."
"The health probe is pretty good for your backend health. It tells you whether it's communicating and talking to the endpoint correctly. It is quite useful."
"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."
 

Cons

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"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."
"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."
"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"I do not have any notes on improvement."
"The only thing I encountered was related to integration, mostly concerning translation."
"The usability of the interface could be improved as it is not user-friendly."
"The usability of the interface could be improved as it is not user-friendly."
"The graphical interface needs improvement because it is not user friendly."
"Implementing and standardizing the solution across the IT landscape in a heterogeneous environment is painful."
"It could be easier to change servicing."
"Customer service can be improved. There is room for improvement, specifically in paid support, by providing more direct contact."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is not scalable."
"It is a bit tricky to configure. You've got to have a very specific format to configure it. They should make it a little bit easier to configure. Mapping the certificates into it isn't easy, and it could be better. Currently, you've to write a bit of automation to pull certificates directly to HTTPS."
"The solution can sometimes feel a little cumbersome unless you're a professional infrastructure person."
"It could be more stable, and support could be better. It would also be better if they offered more features. For example, it lacks security features. Before we used another English solution, and we realized that some of the rules were not set up correctly and passed through the Application Gateway's English controllers. But the problem, in this case, is if you send ten rules, for example, six rules hit some issues. IP address blocking could be better. The rules, for example, don't work properly. If you have one issue, one rule or another rule will not work. This sounds like total madness to me."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"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."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
Information not available
"We use the tool's basic subscription. Its licensing costs are monthly."
"There is a need to pay a fixed price per month to use the product. There are no additional payments to be made to Microsoft apart from the charges paid towards the monthly licensing costs attached to the solution."
"The solution is paid monthly. The solution is highly expensive."
"Regarding pricing for Azure Application Gateway, I would rate it at seven."
"There is some additional cost, such as extended support."
"Every solution comes with a license and cost. Microsoft provides the license and the total cost is for the maintenance every year."
"I rate the pricing seven out of ten because some third-party solutions are even costlier than this."
"I would rate the pricing a three out of ten, with ten being cheap and one being expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
No data available
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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...
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...
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
The price is not the cheapest, but it offers great value for money. I would rate it as an eight out of ten for pricing.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
While we find the solution to be really good overall, some improvements could be made to the alerting system, specifi...
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
We use Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service situated in front of our web-facing APIs. This includes everything th...
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 DNS
No data available
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Information Not Available
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.