F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Pricing
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX
Considered Both Products
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Chose F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 APM beats them all, hands down for internally hosted applications.
NGINX

No answer on this topic

Features
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.9
31 Ratings
11% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings9.216 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.626 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.826 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings9.126 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings8.928 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings8.824 Ratings
Best Alternatives
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(16 ratings)
8.9
(50 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(5 ratings)
8.3
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
F5
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.
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F5
Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
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Pros
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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F5
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
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Cons
F5
  • 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.
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F5
  • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
  • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
  • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
  • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
  • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
We just love work with f5
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F5
Great value for the product
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Usability
F5
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.
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F5
This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers
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Support Rating
F5
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.
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F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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Alternatives Considered
F5
-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
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F5
I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
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Return on Investment
F5
  • 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.
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F5
  • By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
  • Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
  • Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration