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Cisco Wide Area Application Services vs. Cloudflare

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco WAAS

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ACisco's Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is a WAN optimization option.N/A

    Cloudflare

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/ACloudflare’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
    Cisco WAASCloudflare
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Pro
    $20
    per month
    Business
    $200
    per month
    Free
    Free
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco WAASCloudflare
    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
    Cisco WAASCloudflare
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Cloudflare
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    98%
    Would buy again
    169 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    163 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    169 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    142 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    152 Answers
    Features
    Cisco WAASCloudflare
    DDoS Protection
    Comparison of DDoS Protection features of Cisco Wide Area Application Services and Cloudflare
    Feature
    Cisco Wide Area Application Services
    -
    Ratings
    Cloudflare
    8.4
    6 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Automatic Scalability00 Ratings9.47 Ratings
    Mitigation SLA00 Ratings8.87 Ratings
    Security policy management00 Ratings8.67 Ratings
    WAF capabilities00 Ratings8.67 Ratings
    Request rate limiting00 Ratings7.87 Ratings
    Traffic filtering00 Ratings7.67 Ratings
    Bot detection00 Ratings8.07 Ratings
    Global threat intelligence00 Ratings8.87 Ratings
    Real-time analytics and reporting00 Ratings7.87 Ratings
    User Ratings
    Cisco WAASCloudflare
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (192 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.6
    (154 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
    Cisco WAASCloudflare
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    WAAS works best for cookie cutter and some unique network design implementations. is best suited for an all Cisco network infrastructure. however, a number of 3rd party network devices can be used and supported when using this product. it's easier with all Cisco. It is priced pretty high to get into and medium to enterprise organizations is best suited to implement this in
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cloudflare
    Cloudflare has features as a CDN/Gateway/Reverse Proxy that simply don't exist in other solutions. Having so many capabilities under a single platform, with solid support and high uptime, has been essential. I would recommend it for hobby projects all the way to enterprise scale. There's a lot of push around AI and workers. Some feel like Cloudflare is following the hype. But after reading a lot about the new features, a decent amount of them has real value.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • Network file and application optimization
    • VOIP telephony optimization
    • Citrix application optimization
    • Standardized user experience for networking usage
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • Administrator GUI user interface is archaic and very dated
    • Admin GUI lacks a bunch of feature support options you have to do via CLI
    • Some endpoint functionality needs to be done at each site instead of from the central admin tool. so redundant effort and can cause site config drift
    • Admin GUI lacks some monitoring and reporting options that would be helpful for support and trouble resolution
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cloudflare
    lower cost
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cloudflare
    Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cloudflare
    While I have had good support in the past from Cloudflare's technical support team, I have had some terrible experiences with billing support. I have had multiple tickets sent to their billing support that I will never receive a reply to for over a month. When I finally do get a reply, it has been an automated email that never gives me an answer to my question.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cloudflare
    Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    We are already a Cisco organization for network and security products. Cisco provided us discounting competitors just couldn't get to. competitors required more hardware and more complex setup requirements over this product due to our network design. The end result when comparing WAAS to others were going to be the same speed, experience, and pretty much the same administration requirements from IT. The added cost savings won us over.
    Incentivized
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    Cloudflare
    Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • saves monthly internet service costs
    • seamless network experience for all users at all sites
    • ok troubleshooting admin portal so some IT skills are required to manage this
    • is costly to purchase
    • somewhat complex to set up but easy to administer once working
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots