Cloudflare vs. F5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, provides DDoS and bot mitigation security for business domains, as well as a content delivery network (CDN) and web application firewall (WAF).
$20
per month
F5 Advanced WAF
Score 9.2 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
Pricing
CloudflareF5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall
Editions & Modules
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudflareF5 Advanced WAF
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
CloudflareF5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall
Considered Both Products
Cloudflare

No answer on this topic

F5 Advanced WAF
Chose F5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall
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 …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
CloudflareF5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
BIG-IP
BIG-IP
Score 9.0 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
BIG-IP
BIG-IP
Score 9.0 out of 10
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudflareF5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(159 ratings)
9.3
(10 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.7
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(128 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudflareF5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare
It is easy to set up, and within 10 minutes it is up and running. You can add many domains in one dashboard. So no need for a separate Cloudflare account. I can access all my domain DNS, and customize/add it further. For example by adding the Google Webmaster DNS key or my email provider.
Read full review
F5
Advanced WAF is well suited for protection against account enumeration attacks, protection against known and new increasing attack vectors through out of the box attack signatures and threat campaigns. Also, up to date and accurate IP intelligence database to block based on known IP reputation.
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Pros
Cloudflare
  • Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
  • DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
  • WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits
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F5
  • 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.
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Cons
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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F5
  • I'd like to see the licensing model streamlined instead of having this, plus, plus this, plus this to get a working product. I had to go back to the sales team several different times to get a fully deployed product.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cloudflare
lower cost
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F5
No answers on this topic
Usability
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.
Read full review
F5
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
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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F5
No answers on this topic
Performance
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
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F5
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Cloudflare
We really like to talk to a person on the phone or using chat. But the system is very slow and sending to much email to get the issue solve. Something we don't like to spend time writing on the community forum our issue because we don't want to share detail information of our POC.
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F5
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
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F5
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cloudflare
Firebase can be a good starter for basic projects but as I scaled up, I found it lacking the maturity Cloudflare has. Naturaly, I opted for Cloudflare for bigger projects. I still use Firebase, but for small scale hobby projects only.
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F5
AWAF provides most complete web application and API protection; including L7 DoS; in custimer's multi cloud deployments whether on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, etc.
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Scalability
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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F5
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Cloudflare
  • A lot of requests are cached and so egress costs from downstream providers are mitigated.
  • DDoS protection has also managed to keep our site up and our cloud computing bill down.
  • Setting up a proxy with a worker made putting various Google Cloud Functions running behind a single URL very easy and performant. Plus they offer API Shield on top of this.
Read full review
F5
  • This has been good overall. It has a positive impact on the security of our applications. I don't have necessarily a measurement on ROI, but it definitely definitely added to the security of our products.
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ScreenShots