F5 BIG-IP DNS vs. Cloudflare

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
F5 BIG-IP DNS
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
F5 BIG-IP DNS (formerly BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager) secures DNS infrastructure.N/A
Cloudflare
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
$20
per month
Pricing
F5 BIG-IP DNSCloudflare
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 BIG-IP DNSCloudflare
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 BIG-IP DNSCloudflare
Considered Both Products
F5 BIG-IP DNS
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
DNS defines IP, LTM received and handles the Traffic, all encrypted
Cloudflare

No answer on this topic

Features
F5 BIG-IP DNSCloudflare
DDoS Protection
Comparison of DDoS Protection features of Product A and Product B
F5 BIG-IP DNS
-
Ratings
Cloudflare
10.0
1 Ratings
0% above category average
Automatic Scalability00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Mitigation SLA00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Security policy management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
WAF capabilities00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Request rate limiting00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Traffic filtering00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Bot detection00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Global threat intelligence00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Real-time analytics and reporting00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
F5 BIG-IP DNSCloudflare
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
IBM Cloud Internet Services
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
F5 BIG-IP DNSCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(17 ratings)
9.1
(184 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(6 ratings)
8.6
(8 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(149 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 BIG-IP DNSCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
F5
Less appropriate: - Not best bet for startup’s as their budget is always tight - Not good for those companies where the engineers are not highly skilled otherwise the use Irules and security policies will not be utilised in optimal manner as it requires more cpu resources to work especially irules - For companies fully on cloud doesn’t best fit as I already highlighted cloud require more improvements when it comes to seamless performance Best Suited -Large enterprise companies where budget is not an issue - Companies whose traffic Rate Per Second is very high as it can handle huge RPS without latency - Companies whose business is surely depends on their availability
Read full review
Cloudflare
Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.
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Pros
F5
  • Routing the traffic to multiple data centers deployed in different locations
  • Examines the servers health, performance metrics and do evaluation on the basis of geography as well to redirect queries to optimal destination
  • Provides rate limiting feature to mitigate DDos and DNS flood attacks
  • Best in routing the traffic to multiple clouds including on prem resources
  • Faster results of the queries and reduced latency is one of the biggest advantages of F5 BIG-IP DNS
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Cloudflare
  • The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
  • Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
  • One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.
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Cons
F5
  • I'd like to see better reporting capabilities on the decision-making process for DNS resolutions. Currently there are plenty of log messages for that, but I'd like to see tighter integration into the GUI.
  • It could be an improvement to better discriminate features intended for AA vs LDNS functionality within the GUI.
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Cloudflare
  • In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
  • Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
  • While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
We use this heavily and it is one of the best products out there for this type of use case. We already have LTMs and to leverage GTM on top of that is just a piece of cake. Everything is so well integrated its amazing
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Cloudflare
lower cost
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Usability
F5
Most important usability of F5 BIG-IP DNS is it’s stability which other vendors lack -As mentioned earlier as well, it’s scalability is humongous as it can honour millions of request per second without latency - irules feature makes it top and worthy to fight with top contenders like cloudflare and Cisco - Moreover it’s stable even when the Rate Per second is high and at the same time, DDos occurs - Interface is user friendly for simple tasks but requires more manual work - TAC should provide more assistance when it comes to normal support as well but they do offer professional support license for tasks which other vendor assist on normal license as well
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Cloudflare
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
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Reliability and Availability
F5
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
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Performance
F5
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
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Support Rating
F5
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.
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Implementation Rating
F5
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
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Alternatives Considered
F5
As I mentioned, the GSLB capability, being able to do intelligent DNS by having access to monitor specific endpoints associated to my current BIG-IP infrastructure, I believe that brings a huge value, then combine fast responses and security.
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Cloudflare
They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.
They have very good reputation.
They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.
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Scalability
F5
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
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Return on Investment
F5
  • Saved almost 1.2 million USD for one of critical activities as downtime could have posed this but due to failover based on health checks saved these bucks
  • Business impact which can be caused due to DDos attacks avoided
  • High cost licensing as mentioned earlier as well
  • Analytical limitations as F5 has also mentioned multiple it’s not an analytical tool
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Cloudflare
  • Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
  • WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
  • CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
  • DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.
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