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F5 Advanced WAF pros and cons

Vendor: F5

4.3 out of 5

69 reviews
98% willing to recommend

328 followers

Pros & Cons summary

F5 Advanced WAF delivers superior security through AI, with features like DDoS and antivirus protection, advanced load balancing, and compliance tools. It allows extensive customization via iRules. However, deployment complexity, additional module requirements, and pricing inflexibility pose challenges. Scalability and logging issues remain, while threat intelligence needs enhancement. Despite these drawbacks, its technical support and policy flexibility outshine competitors, but significant expertise is needed for effective use.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

F5 Advanced WAF offers a comprehensive set of security features, including AI for bot protection and advanced policy customization options.

Users value its stability and scalability, making it a preferred choice for web application security.

The platform is known for its effective DDoS mitigation and overall application protection capabilities.

F5 Advanced WAF provides notable features, such as load balancing and attack signature updates, which are appreciated for ensuring security efficacy.

The licensing model offers flexibility, allowing organizations to choose the specific features they need without incurring unnecessary costs.

CONS

F5 Advanced WAF requires improved integration within applications, such as better remote dashboards and enhanced compatibility with multiple cloud environments.

There is a need for better reporting and logging capabilities, as current options are basic and event logs are automatically deleted after a certain period, which poses issues for review.

The deployment and configuration process of F5 Advanced WAF is intricate, requiring significant time and expertise, making it less user-friendly.

F5 Advanced WAF pricing is considered high, and more flexibility in pricing and licensing options would be beneficial.

There are issues with scalability and stability, which require enhancement for better performance and user satisfaction.

F5 Advanced WAF Pros review quotes

JD

Network Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Aug 2, 2020

In terms of F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features, I would definitely say its stability. F5 is one the most stable products. Either as the load balancer or the web application firewall, it is very stable.

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reviewer2000166

Senior Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 5, 2024

The solution's most valuable features include application DDoS protection, bot blocking, and HTTP header verifications.

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reviewer1374657

Executive Director IT Security at a printing company with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 21, 2020

There is no need to worry about updating signatures because WAF will automatically update the signatures for you.

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F5 Advanced WAF

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HU

Hillary-Ugwuanyi

Freelancer at Freelance

Jan 23, 2023

The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its grand unity of the implementation, where you have the freedom to configure based on how it affects your use case or your organization. With the default setting of implicit deny, you can gradually start defining and deploying the tool to align with your environment, whether it is outdated, recent, or futuristic. This allows you to customize the solution to protect you from threat actors. You have the ability to define what the advanced threat act should do - whether it should alert, deny, or both - and it will deliver based on your configuration. Unlike other online solutions, F5 Advanced WAF provides flexibility to deliver to your unique environment the way you want.

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ME

Mohamed Eltabakh

Network Security Consultant at GBM

Dec 6, 2022

It is easy to obtain dashboard compliance because security policy views are included.

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GS

Security Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Apr 18, 2022

Feature-wise, they are always cutting edge and up-to-date. Many features aren't available via competitors. There's always a lot of enhanced critical features that just aren't available through anyone else, or, if they are, are too lightweight.

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reviewer1212621

Product Manager at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 14, 2022

Good technology for mitigating different application attacks, e.g. DDoS, DNS, and layer seven attacks.

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KL

Head of Presales at Fujitsu

Jun 23, 2022

The solution is stable.

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GM

Geofrey Mwaseba

SOC Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 28, 2022

The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its ability to have a pool of resources that can distribute your traffic, and that is a plus for me. My company tried to look into a competitor, Imperva, but it was lacking that capability, so F5 Advanced WAF outperforms Imperva.

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RS

Senior Network Consultant at Visionet Systems Inc.

Jul 9, 2024

F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 68)

F5 Advanced WAF Cons review quotes

JD

Network Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Aug 2, 2020

I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before.

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reviewer2000166

Senior Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 5, 2024

More legacy protocols should be added to the solution.

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reviewer1374657

Executive Director IT Security at a printing company with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 21, 2020

The contextual-based component needs a lot of help to catch up with the next-gen products.

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F5 Advanced WAF

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about F5 Advanced WAF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.

HU

Hillary-Ugwuanyi

Freelancer at Freelance

Jan 23, 2023

While F5 Advanced WAF does limit the number of partners in certain regions to ensure successful business transactions, they could also benefit from expanding their partnerships and making it easier for more people to learn about and become experts in F5 Advanced WAF. By doing so, they could increase the reach and exposure of their solution, similar to how Cisco has become widely recognized in the security industry.

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ME

Mohamed Eltabakh

Network Security Consultant at GBM

Dec 6, 2022

The solution should include RASP for another level of protection at the code itself.

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GS

Security Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Apr 18, 2022

We usually use a third-party tool for logging and reporting. It would be nice if we could do that right on this solution. They have one, but it's not very stable. Logging and reporting effectively would be a big enhancement.

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reviewer1212621

Product Manager at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 14, 2022

Compatibility with multiple cloud environments needs improvement. Both stability and scalability need to be improved.

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KL

Head of Presales at Fujitsu

Jun 23, 2022

The deployment side is quite complex.

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GM

Geofrey Mwaseba

SOC Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 28, 2022

For me, an area for improvement in F5 Advanced WAF is the reporting as it isn't so clear. The vendor needs to work on the reporting capability of the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of F5 Advanced WAF is threat intelligence to protect your web application, particularly having that capability out-of-the-box, and not needing to pay extra for it, similar to what's offered in FortiWeb, for example, any request that originates from a malicious IP will be blocked automatically by FortiWeb. F5 Advanced WAF should have the intelligence for blocking malicious IPs, or automatically blocking threats included in the license, instead of making it an add-on feature that users have to pay for apart from the standard licensing fees.

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RS

Senior Network Consultant at Visionet Systems Inc.

Jul 9, 2024

Support is a little slow.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 66)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs F5 Advanced WAF

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Azure Front Door vs F5 Advanced WAF

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

NetScaler vs F5 Advanced WAF

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

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Akamai App and API Protector vs F5 Advanced WAF

Azure Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

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