NGINX App Protect vs Symantec Web Application Firewall comparison

NGINX App Protect vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall

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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 ...

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX App Protect is 2.2%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Web Application Firewall is 0.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.4%
NGINX App Protect	2.2%
Symantec Web Application Firewall	0.6%
Other	91.8%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

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.

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Valerio Guaglianone

Dev Ops Engineer at adesso AG

Long-term web protection has supported reliable traffic management but needs a simpler interface

NGINX App Protect is a good product. I have used both versions from F5 -also the free version- (I mean the NGINX/NGINX One/App Protect free trial period), and I think it is a good product. It's stable, affordable, and easy to manage. NGINX App Protect is a comprehensive security solution that combines advanced WAF, DoS protection, API security, and DevSecOps automation in a lightweight, scalable package ideal for modern cloud-native architectures. The adaptive machine learning capabilities are truly commendable, as the solution can establish traffic baselines and detect anomalies in real time. It automatically adjusts security policies, minimizing the need for manual intervention and reducing false positives. Additionally, it supports scalable deployment across diverse environments, including on-premises, cloud, Kubernetes, and containers, offering both flexibility and scalability I have experience with the web server, F5 load balancer, and similar products provided by Ergon, for eg. the web application firewall and the Microgateway for K8S. I'm also familiar with F5 BIG-IP products.

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Vatsal Mehta

Director, Co-Founder & CEO at HEDEHI Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Boosts Security Measures with Easy Deployment and Implementation

Regarding areas for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall, I think they can enhance the features they currently focus on, as there are various types of web applications, and it would be great if they could develop features to cater to all these types. For example, a feature to scan for unauthorized plugins or extensions could let us know if those extensions are authorized, unauthorized, or malicious. There's room for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall by introducing AI into their dashboard so that we can query the dashboard and fetch data insights, similar to querying ChatGPT for answers. They currently have this feature but can make improvements for better querying to get insights.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."

"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

"For us, the key feature of Cloudflare is DDoS protection and IP hiding, especially since we are a crypto company."

"There is a huge signature repository"

"The setup process is very simple for me."

"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."

"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution, and it's working."

"It is a very good tool for load balancing."

"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its flexibility."

"Based on my experience, this solution is better than the other choices on the market."

"The stability of the product is very impressive since it handles 60,000 to 70,000 requests or transactions per second."

"NGINX App Protect is stable."

More NGINX App Protect pros

"The solution has an up-to-date data repository to deal with external threats."

"The best feature of Symantec Web Application Firewall is that it is very easy to use, and the deployment and implementation processes are really easy."

"It provides us with a sense of security."

"The setup was straightforward."

"The interface is user-friendly."

"This product is doing what it should and what we are expecting from it."

Cons

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."

"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."

"The reporting could be more granular."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment."

"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."

"The contributions I think sometimes take a toll on you like you're going to spend a lot of time on the right contributions."

"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."

"The GUI and web GUI configuration could be improved to be easier to manage and use."

"The support from NGINX App Protect is too expensive."

"It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput."

"Right now, the tool doesn't provide an option revolving around update feeds, specifically the signature update option in the UI."

More NGINX App Protect cons

"There's room for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall by introducing AI into their dashboard so that we can query the dashboard and fetch data insights, similar to querying ChatGPT for answers."

"On a scale from one to 10, I would give it a five. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily the best solution going forward in the future."

"It would be an improvement if the management dashboards were not reliant upon Java."

"I'm not convinced that it's necessary the best solution going forward in the future."

"It would be an improvement if the management dashboards were not reliant upon Java."

"One of our issues is that sometimes scanning slows down the endpoints."

"Sometimes scanning slows down the endpoints."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"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."

"The solution is expensive."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"It is not too pricey."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."

"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."

"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."

"NGINX is not expensive."

"The product's price is high."

"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	12

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

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 NGINX App Protect?

I will not be able to answer about my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for NGINX App Protect, as so...

What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

I think NGINX App Protect could be improved by having it come out of the box with NGINX.

What is your primary use case for NGINX App Protect?

My main use case for NGINX App Protect is primarily in our infrastructure layer with Kubernetes, as I am using it to ...

What needs improvement with Symantec Web Application Firewall?

Regarding areas for improvement in Symantec Web Application Firewall, I think they can enhance the features they curr...

What is your primary use case for Symantec Web Application Firewall?

Our use case for Symantec Web Application Firewall is primarily for security purposes as we develop web application s...

What advice do you have for others considering Symantec Web Application Firewall?

I would recommend Symantec Web Application Firewall to other users due to all the benefits I mentioned earlier, such ...

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Comparisons

Compared 8% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 8% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 7% of the time

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 6% of the time

Haltdos Enterprise WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 5% of the time

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NetScaler vs Symantec Web Application Firewall

Compared 36% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Symantec Web Application Firewall

Compared 21% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Symantec Web Application Firewall

Compared 18% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Symantec Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

WAPPLES vs Symantec Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

NGINX App Protect

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Download Symantec Web Application Firewall product report

Symantec Web Application Firewall report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

Symantec WAF, Blue Coat Protecting Web Applications

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
Complying with security and regulatory requirements

NGINX App Protect offers:

Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security

The Symantec Web Application Firewall (WAF) enables you to secure and accelerate your web applications.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Information Not Available

NGINX App Protect vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall