Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. NGINX vs. StackPath Edge Security

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Barracuda Web Application Firewall
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Barracuda Web Application Firewall, from Barracuda Networks in Campbell, California, protects web applications from bots, DDoS attacks, and other advanced threats to enterprise apps.N/A
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
StackPath Edge Security
Score 0.0 out of 10
N/A
StackPath Edge Security includes device-level fingerprinting, diverse DDoS attack profiling, and globally synchronized threat detection and mitigation reduces false-positives and catches sophisticated and emerging threats.N/A
Pricing
Barracuda Web Application FirewallNGINXStackPath Edge Security
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Barracuda Web Application FirewallNGINXStackPath Edge Security
Free Trial
YesYesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Barracuda Web Application FirewallNGINXStackPath Edge Security
Features
Barracuda Web Application FirewallNGINXStackPath Edge Security
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Barracuda Web Application Firewall
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.7
32 Ratings
9% above category average
StackPath Edge Security
-
Ratings
IDE support00 Ratings7.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.627 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.827 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings9.327 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings8.929 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings9.025 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Barracuda Web Application FirewallNGINXStackPath Edge Security
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Barracuda Web Application FirewallNGINXStackPath Edge Security
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(6 ratings)
8.9
(50 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Barracuda Web Application FirewallNGINXStackPath Edge Security
Likelihood to Recommend
Barracuda Networks, Inc.
Easy to use and reliable, with very little maintenance required and zero downtime to date. For the education sector, ease of use is hugely important as IT Managers/Technicians are often "Jack of all trades" with a good, broad general knowledge but perhaps lacking specific expertise in certain aspects. Being provided with easy-to-follow tutorials and instructions has been very useful in setting up and configuring the firewall, especially as my background is more in desktop support.
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F5
Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
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StackPath
No answers on this topic
Pros
Barracuda Networks, Inc.
  • Attack patterns are regularly updates through contents via Barracuda Web Application Firewall update servers
  • Bot Protection has a good line feature to verify between the genuine clients like browsers and bots
  • Dos Protection also good level of protection to mitigate Layer 7 attacks
  • Allow Deny Rules provides a lot of granular controls to allow and deny the traffic
  • URL profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
  • Parameter profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
  • Risk score feature for the clients to mitigate attacks is also very good feature
  • Client fingerprint module can be used against malicious user to enhance security
  • Separate XML and JSOn profile for all the URL profiles of the application is plus
  • API security is very much effective and shadow API can also be identified
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F5
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
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StackPath
No answers on this topic
Cons
Barracuda Networks, Inc.
  • STM crashes sometimes happen due to unusual traffic pattern
  • Obfuscation on the client side user credentials which appears in the developer tools of browser
  • URL Profiles redundancy during the learning of traffic needs to be fixed
  • Dos Protection should be more granular like escalation period to throw JS challenge, Captcha and rate limit when escalation period hits until the WAF stops the attack
  • Client Fingerprinting should work as expected when verifying the clients as in rare some scenarios, it creates issues
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F5
  • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
  • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
  • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
  • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
  • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
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StackPath
No answers on this topic
Likelihood to Renew
Barracuda Networks, Inc.
No answers on this topic
F5
Great value for the product
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StackPath
No answers on this topic
Usability
Barracuda Networks, Inc.
-User friendly interface for quick learning -Quick deployment for deploying applications -Easy to manage for naive -System components and upgradation of the WAF is very easy go with -Back restoration is very to make it up and ready anytime -Seperate JSON and XmL profiles for each URLs of the application is plus -Amazing and world class support engineer in comparison other vendors and always available to support -Quick resolution on bugs with their patch applying process
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F5
This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers
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StackPath
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Barracuda Networks, Inc.
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is easy to use. Support from Barracuda is great also. Load Balancing of the Web Application Firewall is also nice. This allows you to do maintenance or have large loads for the end-user. Threat monitoring of our network and traffic coming into our services within our cloud solution.
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F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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StackPath
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Barracuda Networks, Inc.
We have been using their Backup products especially Backup Appliances and legacy products like Intronis. We are also using their Cloud Backup Solutions for O365. This is the reason we opted for this product.
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F5
I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
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StackPath
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Barracuda Networks, Inc.
  • Much better response times for remote transactions
  • 4 year refresh cycle included with active support contracts
  • More expensive than traditional firewalls (however its superior to those, not apples to apples)
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F5
  • By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
  • Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
  • Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
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StackPath
No answers on this topic
ScreenShots

Barracuda Web Application Firewall Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration