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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

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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

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)
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)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (26th)
 

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.
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…
Archana Heeralal - PeerSpot reviewer
A good solution to implement web application firewall for applications
There are some lags in Signal Sciences for the web application firewalls. Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic. There is a little bit of complexity with custom rules that should be removed. Signal Sciences should add a feature called rate limiting with multiple options, wherein I can create a rate limiting based on the cookie request or the IP.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The UI is good."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"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."
"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."
"The production is a valuable feature."
"Load balancing and web application firewall features are the most valuable."
"The solution's most valuable feature is an HTTP solution and SSL certificate. It is also easy to use."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is an easy-to-use solution."
"The solution integrates different applications and APIs securely, enhancing overall security and network optimization."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway are the policies, the data store they are using, and the cloud platform it operates on."
"In my experience, Microsoft products have a smooth integration and facilitate easy management and monitoring. Using Azure Application Gateway allows us to efficiently handle the system loads."
"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."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
 

Cons

"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."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"I want the solution's support to improve. The tool is also expensive."
"Application Gateway’s limitation is that the private and the public endpoint cannot use the same port."
"I believe that there is room for improvement in terms of additional functionality. It is an advantage to have features readily available for configuration without needing customer-defined rules."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway could improve by allowing features to use more third-party tools."
"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 pricing of the solution is a bit high. The solution should offer different pricing systems."
"We faced some downtime while validating CNAME."
"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."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"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 tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"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 cheap."
"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."
"The solution is fairly priced."
"The solution is paid monthly. The solution is highly expensive."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."
"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."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is expensive."
"It is not expensive."
"The tool's pricing model is pay-as-you-go."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
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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%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

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'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...
What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
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.
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.