F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

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.

Incentivized

So a lot of companies that have a digital side and they have a lot of applications in the cloud, this is one of those areas that it can protect the net so it can lock 'em down, it'll build a baseline so you understand what that application's doing. So if it sees something not normal, it'll get protected against that.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
• I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
• F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
• We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Lack of warnings, currently the console does not provide a warning when deleting key-value entry.
• The web GUI could use some tweaking, currently no undo option when removing exclusion rules.
• Configuration complexity, currently menus and options are hidden, making it hard to configure vs on prem.

We just love work with f5

Incentivized

I would continue using F5 Distributed Cloud WAF because I am highly satisfied with its robust and comprehensive features that effectively protect our applications from evolving cyber threats. The advanced AI capabilities enhance threat detection and response, providing proactive security. Additionally, the excellent customer support ensures quick resolution of any issues, making the overall experience reliable and efficient. Trust in the manufacturer’s innovation and continuous updates further motivates me to keep this solution as a core part of our security infrastructure.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I believe is a solution that was designed from the start to be simple and easy to use. Coming from Imperva, it simply eased the burden and complexity of managing and securing our apps on different environments (cloud and on-prem). It easy to scale and very quick to deploy (as a cloud waf should be), provide us with DevOps integrations, visibility and automatic insights from multiple events that guarantee peace of mind for us analysts and opp managers.

Incentivized

Seems no issue

Incentivized

Unnoticed slowness

Incentivized

Highly knowledgeable engineers who understand complex networking and application-delivery issues.


Strong escalation paths — once a case reaches senior engineers, resolutions are fast and accurate.


Comprehensive documentation and many self-service resources for troubleshooting.


Clear communication with well-structured updates throughout the ticket lifecycle.


Excellent for critical incidents, with reliable guidance during high-severity outages.


Deep product expertise across BIG-IP, ASM/Advanced WAF, GTM/DNS, and modern F5 services.

Incentivized

I never contacted support for this product.

Incentivized

Online training saves me lots of time

Incentivized

Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.

Incentivized

I believe that in the case of Big-IP F5, it has a lot of power, a lot of features including the VPN features and also the evaluation of security posture of the devices that connect through VPN. That's very solid and that's something that is not found in all the WAF solutions and so I haven't seen that in Azure.

Incentivized

It provides fewer false positives and a more granular approach to eliminating them, allowing us to focus on threats. Also, with the need to secure both on-premise and cloud-based web applications, we can only use Azure on the cloud part, but we still need to cover on-premise apps with WAF, so we would need to double the time to deploy and manage. Also, its flexibility of deployment scenarios offers us a faster time to deploy WAF without adjusting the app delivery process to WAF's existence.

Incentivized

Dont see any issue so far

Incentivized

• One impact F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF has on our organization's overall business objectives is that F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF is security sensitive
• Another impact F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF has on our organization's overall business objectives is the F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF blocking feature

Incentivized

• It gives us peace of mind knowing that we have an easy way to mitigate any bad traffic coming to our websites and e-commerce. So it really gives us peace of mind. It doesn't affect the job projecting where the traffic is coming from. We actually have the bot functionality as well, so if there is any bot attacking our website, it automatically prevents it. So it's been pretty productive.

Incentivized