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

Fortinet FortiWeb vs SonicWall Web Application Firewall [EOL] comparison

Sponsored
 

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 Web Application ...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (6th)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
SonicWall Web Application F...
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
HameedAhmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Joint Director at PAA
Security threats have been reduced through seamless deployment and strong integration with other tools
I have used Fortinet FortiWeb's integration features. We have easily integrated all of the applications with the product. Most of the applications we are using are in-house built. My technical team is looking after the best features. I have not used it extensively for maybe two and a half years. I have been involved in the installation, but I am not actually using the product. I work with it from time to time but not extensively. I would assess Fortinet FortiWeb's adaptive machine learning and artificial intelligence as having new patches installed regarding artificial intelligence, but when we bought it, I think the learning feature was there. Now they have installed artificial intelligence features through patches. We have a complete portfolio of Fortinet in our organization, including FortiMail, Fortinet FortiWeb, and FortiGate, along with multi-factor authentication. All of the products are from Fortinet. Fortinet tools integrate with each other and work in conjunction. I think Fortinet FortiWeb has helped us meet regulatory compliance because we are not a regulatory organization, but our sister organization is regulatory. We have regulatory compliance with the International Civil Aviation Authority, whose audit teams have checked our data center and these security products, and they are satisfied with us. The question about leveraging Fortinet FortiWeb's automated policy management does not pertain to my domain because I am not so technical, but I am in a management role now. My engineer is more technical than me. I would rate this product an eight point five out of ten.
Narender Reddy - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at iLenSys Technologies Pvt Ltd
A stable and durable solution that can be used for security and tunneling
We use SonicWall Web Application Firewall for security and tunneling We should get the logs from the solution, and it should communicate with the local DNS. There is some lag in the solution's technical support response time. I have been using SonicWall Web Application Firewall for one year.…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For us, the key feature of Cloudflare is DDoS protection and IP hiding, especially since we are a crypto company."
"It is configurable via API."
"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"Fortinet FortiWeb has helped our organization by protecting the web application from any attack, known and unknown."
"Application delivery is strong."
"Technical support is very good. they are quite helpful and responsive."
"It makes our web site system work nice and smooth."
"The GUI is user-friendly."
"L-7 protection makes possible to protect legacy/not up-to-date servers/applications without changing the application code."
"Also, if you serve files or you accept files with your server, Fortiweb has built-in antivirus. The Fortinet product family also provides good IP intelligence (botnet C&C, etc.)."
"Built-in security templates, AV integrated, strong threat intelligence."
"The solution is more advanced and efficient than its competitors such as Meraki."
"Capture ATP is a good additional feature in the latest version."
"SonicWall Web Application Firewall is very smooth and cool, and a very user-friendly firewall."
"The solution offers better data protection than competitors."
"We use SonicWall Web Application Firewall for security and tunneling."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare should update the version of the ModSecurity core rule set that they run on."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"We would like to know more about the integration with the hardware or security products, such as Gemalto, because we need to move to that point."
"The F5 solution has more features than Fortinet FortiWeb, such as multiple load balancing."
"There is room for improvement in the portability on multi-cloud environments."
"The interface could have the interdependent elements arranged sequentially and wizards that go through most common deployment actions."
"We also need configuration settings that indicate the advantages or disadvantages of enabled features."
"Another area for improvement is logging. When troubleshooting, the logs sometimes take a while to update. We've had people report that some things aren't logged if they're successful. It's a bit hit-and-miss. For example, sometimes people access one of our services, and it's successful, but we don't see that in the logs."
"There is room for improvement in the support. The response time could be faster. Plus, they ask for a lot of information. It is not easy to get support."
"Capacity-wise, since there is hardware involved, it cannot scale too much."
"We have a lot of unknown errors popping up in the latest version."
"The solution needs an access management feature with API integration so we can assign certain levels of access within groups."
"The latest version needs a lot of work because it's not yet as stable as the previous versions. We're getting a lot of unknown errors popping up."
"We should get the logs from the solution, and it should communicate with the local DNS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The solution is expensive."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"It is not too pricey."
"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."
"It is a cost-effective product. If you need an extra module in the product, there will be an extra cost in addition to the licensing fee."
"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."
"​The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution is very inexpensive when compared to F5 Advanced WAF and Avi Networks but offers the same benefits."
"Due to the situation in Iran with the sanctions, the price of this solution is very expensive."
"Cheaper than others."
"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."
"All our Fortinet pricing is bundled together for different products, like FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiWeb. FortiWeb, by itself, is probably around $2,500 to $3,500."
"The pricing is competitive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
No data available
 

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 Business60
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise37
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?
The pricing for Fortinet FortiWeb varies with different models having different prices. It depends on the requirement...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
There is room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb. The team was only from FortiGate itself. They are making new firm...
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiWeb?
Fortinet FortiWeb is very good as a web application solution. I have been working with Fortinet FortiWeb since 2020.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
AMANZIMTOTI HIGH SCHOOL
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Fortinet, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: May 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.