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Link11 vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 6, 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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Link11
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
CDN (13th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (30th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (19th), Bot Management (10th), API Security (15th)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (28th)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
PF
Exceptional resilience and protection well-suited for medium to large businesses
The initial setup process is quite straightforward. Its complexity largely depends on the intricacies of your platform. If your platform spans multiple sites across the globe, requiring configuration of multiple instances and traffic routing, it can become more intricate. From our experience, even in companies with extensive platforms, the configuration process remains relatively simple. Once the instances are spun up and the initial configurations are in place, you can use their console application to set up your site or sites for traffic management. This involves configuring the sites and uploading SSL certificates. Even for those not well-versed in the intricacies of networking layers and rules, the out-of-the-box configurations already provide solid protection.
Shashank N - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good stability, but the agent-based approach could be more convenient
The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF. Additionally, the agent-based approach presents challenges with managing agents across versions and dependencies on specific application platforms like Apache or NGINX, leading to compatibility issues and complexity in integration. This agent-based system proved particularly difficult to manage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare makes it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple users and multiple clients, and basically go in and access their account, make the changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"It's very user-friendly."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"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."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The UI is good."
"Provides mobile app security."
"It is a highly resilient product that can handle significantly larger workloads and high volumes of traffic with ease."
"The feature I find most valuable is the user-friendly dashboard. It is easy to understand how everything works and it allows you to make decisions quickly and efficiently."
"I very much like the elastic search and reports, allowing us to have a 360-degree view of the customer's activities and enabling us to track down any suspicious bots."
"The real-time monitoring and reporting are very good. There are information updates in their portal every two minutes. They also have the ability to spill it into Sumo Logic, for example. It's very easy to use."
"The best thing about Reblaze, for us, is that it has been a game changer because previously, we were using Google's Web Application Firewall, but it wasn't up to the mark."
"Reblaze knows how to manage security. For me as, someone who knows little about security, it's good that I have a firm that optimizes everything according to their standards. It's their responsibility and they are fully hands-on."
"The most valuable features were the real-time monitoring and the management. With this kind of product, you need a very good management system to allow you to see false positives in real-time; to see what's happening in real-time... The clarity stood out. It was very visible and very easy to navigate; very easy to find the data we were looking for."
"Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
 

Cons

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"Support response time could be improved."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"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."
"It would be beneficial if it had a workflow or a feature that could fine-tune settings based on high-level requirements."
"There is room for improvement in helping us understanding session management... We want Reblaze to catch and identify everything. We want to see the various devices doing one activity and to see, in a timeline, what's happened. We would like to see a more human-readable display to understand what's happening in the web app."
"Some of the settings on the dashboard are confusing."
"We have multiple products behind different instances of Reblaze. We have one instance for staging and then we have a production instance for multiple products. One of the things that we have requested is a unified view panel, so that we can see each of the instances in a unified view. That way, we won't have to go bouncing from instance to instance."
"The WAF features are not as granular as we would expect from a WAF system. There should be more granularity and in-depth rules, out-of-the-box."
"Up to now the only cons I could find is sometimes getting change management back on track, because it's a company that evolves, and sometimes I don't have the same needs that they have. But besides that, up until now, I am really pleased with their service and I've also recommended them to some of my clients."
"They have an interface that you have to adjust to. That is a bit of a downfall because I expect an interface to be very intuitive for someone who knows little about security. But if you know about security, the interface is wonderful."
"The next release should have next-generation automation."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"The UI is not very intuitive and could be better."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"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 pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"There is still some room for improvement when it comes to bot management from Reblaze because they are relatively new compared to other vendors in the town."
"On a monthly basis we pay $750."
"I believe that for the six instances we have right now, it's costing us $16,000 per month."
"We found the cost to be a bit on the higher side, starting at approximately three to four thousand dollars for a small configuration."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Performing Arts
9%
Educational Organization
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
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 do you like most about Reblaze?
It is a highly resilient product that can handle significantly larger workloads and high volumes of traffic with ease.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Reblaze?
We found the cost to be a bit on the higher side, starting at approximately three to four thousand dollars for a smal...
What needs improvement with Reblaze?
There is a potential improvement regarding simplifying the complexity of rule creation. It would be beneficial if it ...
What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?
The pricing is very competitive compared to other providers. The pricing is definitely a factor in our decision-makin...
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
We do use it, but the UI can be improved as we mostly work through the CI/CD. It provides support, but sometimes it i...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Reblaze
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

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.
CBC, Hermes, Gartner
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about Link11 vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.