Cloudflare vs. Radware Bot Manager

Based on my experience, Cloudflare is well-suited for high-traffic websites and probably e-commerce platforms. Cloudflare can mitigate the risk of attacks on these websites using WAF and DNS protection mechanisms and provide cached content to the end-users quickly. The websites where it is not suitable are those that need high security and compliance requirements as Cloudflare might not meet all those criteria.

Incentivized

All new upgraded non-human bot detection feature is widely used across all the platforms open for customers and it is a great success. It provides zero access to malicious bots.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• ShieldSquare provides an easy to implement way of identifying website users that could be bots.
• By rating the potential of the user of being a bot, we are able to handle that user in the proper way.
• False positives are extremely rare with ShieldSquare. Plus, their support staff is also available to analyze traffic to specific content, and they can customize their algorithms when necessary to optimize the performance of their solution to suit our needs.

• 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

• It would be nice to allow for more granularity when selecting which bots I'd like to allow through. I contacted support and asked about this and they said this was in the works.
• If you select to show captchas instead of blocking, I feel their captcha screen could use some improvement on the UI/UX to make it more intuitive for users to know what to do. I contacted support and made them aware of this.
• Would be nice to see captchas information in the statistics (i.e. how many captchas were presented, from what IP addresses, how many were filled out correctly),

Incentivized

lower cost

Incentivized

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

In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.

Incentivized

Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.

Incentivized

I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.

Incentivized

Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

When I compared these two products, Distil Networks only offered a solution where their bot detection sits in between your website and the visitors, similar to how Cloudflare works. I didn't want this so I decided to go for ShieldSquare that uses connectors. I want my visitors to hit the website directly, not have something sit in between.

They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Network Bandwidth efficiency

Incentivized