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
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
F5 Networks offers the Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) to provide bot defense, advanced application protection, anti-bot SDK, and other features.
N/A
Radware Alteon
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Radware Alteon, from Israeli company Radware, is an application delivery controller.
Cloudflare was better, because we do not have to host or purchase any additional hardware. This means reduced costs for us to have to buy the hardware. Then, hire people to run the hardwar, and support the hardware. And, it also means you need SME's for the tool that have used …
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Verified User
Employee
Chose F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Sure! Here's a made-up but professional response you can use or adapt depending on the context (e.g., a report, RFP, internal justification, etc.):
Describe how F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF stacks up against them and why you selected F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF.
F5 WAF provides much more control and has a lot of features that can be used to protect your applications. You can have granular configuration settings per application and disable attack signatures on very specific scenarios whenever is needed. Also, the logs are very detailed …
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.
I believe that in industrial environments like ours where we have to have bare metal devices near the production environment combined with hybrid cloud, that is a good platform. That's a good use case. It optimizes traffic. It helps us stay more secure in our data centers. Now with regards to that are fully operating in the cloud, I'm not really sure if we would make the same decision considering the option that I said to have something that is self-provision to avoid too much management of virtual machines on the cloud. So that's an area of improvement.
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.
So the product definitely is helping us for sudden attacks through DDOS, some injection ingestion into UI URLs, and definitely it's capturing those and I definitely see that as an advantage for us. They can stop the hackers from using our endpoints.
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.
The UI for events. E.g., clicking the "Accept" button does nothing.
Traffic learning suggestions are often very incorrect. We were originally suggested to use "Automatic" learning, and had to completely scrap the policy due to the suggestions.
"All in one" dashboard for viewing application URL/parameter overrides per policy.
The software web application is beyond terrible, in most of the cases the web was broken or did not have similar functionality the command line interface had.
The command line interface wasn't a natural looking interface, it was very fumbled and while it ran on Linux, the interface was all menus and sub-menus.
When enabling different pools for different web services, when a new pool was activated, the old pool connections were all reset instead of allowing HTTP sessions to naturally expire.
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.
Most* of it is very intuitive and easy to use. The "Help" section is fairly fantastic. See some of my other comments about things like the "Traffic Learning" section being wildly wrong sometimes, and also the event logs with UI buttons that don't do anything. Overall though, it's an excellent product.
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.
-Stable data path equals to less crashes -Almost all the features working as expected -Provides more granular controls in allowing false positives -Request evaluation is accurate -Irules feature is a plus
We moved away from Alteon to F5 BigIP LTM and just by swapping out the hardware, we saw 40% speed increase in our applications. Everything else is much improved as well, from the web interface to the command line to the API.
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.
In our case it has been great because the pricing is just right for all the features that we have on the platform and the flexibility. In fact, we acquired another license last year, so that's something that we're interested in. We are currently moving towards the cloud with our ERP systems and eliminating the IBM platform, so we would like to see that F5 virtual option available on Azure.
