Alibaba Cloud WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

It is doing its job effectively, and its scalability is superb. So, if you have a mixed environment with cloud and on-premise systems to protect this product, provide a solution to the challenge. However, its management is more suited to DevOps teams rather than to the ones responsible for on-premise systems, making the management a bit more complex.

Incentivized

• Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
• I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
• F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
• We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.

Incentivized

• Lack of warnings, currently the console does not provide a warning when deleting key-value entry.
• The web GUI could use some tweaking, currently no undo option when removing exclusion rules.
• Configuration complexity, currently menus and options are hidden, making it hard to configure vs on prem.

We gave it an 8 because it protects our web apps well and is reliable. The WAF is flexible and meets most of our needs. It could improve in user interface and make integrations easier, but overall, it’s a solid and effective security tool for us.

Incentivized

I believe is a solution that was designed from the start to be simple and easy to use. Coming from Imperva, it simply eased the burden and complexity of managing and securing our apps on different environments (cloud and on-prem). It easy to scale and very quick to deploy (as a cloud waf should be), provide us with DevOps integrations, visibility and automatic insights from multiple events that guarantee peace of mind for us analysts and opp managers.

Incentivized

Seems no issue

Incentivized

Unnoticed slowness

Incentivized

I never contacted support for this product.

Incentivized

Online training saves me lots of time

Incentivized

Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.

Incentivized

The other one that I've used in the past, they're very similar and I haven't used it recently, so I can't do a side-by-side comparison today. But I can say that F5 does everything we want it to do consistent with what this other product did do and it's got enhanced features and of course we have a long history with F5 as a product set in general.

Incentivized

Dont see any issue so far

Incentivized

• The biggest gain for us was speed. Before F5 Distributed Cloud WAF, onboarding a new app to our WAF stack meant manual rule tuning, traffic sampling and regression testing. Right now, we spin up a service, tag it with the right policy and its ready (production ready) within hours

Incentivized