F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF vs. NGINX Plus

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 Plus
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
NGINX Plus is presented as a cloud‑native, easy-to-use reverse proxy, load balancer, and API gateway, from F5.
$849
per month billed annually
Pricing
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX Plus
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Team
$849
per month billed annually
Advanced
$2,099
per month billed annually
Enterprise
Tiered Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX Plus
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX Plus
Features
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX Plus
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
-
Ratings
NGINX Plus
8.1
6 Ratings
2% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings7.94 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.25 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings8.25 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings8.35 Ratings
Best Alternatives
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX Plus
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.7 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX Plus
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(16 ratings)
8.4
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(5 ratings)
7.5
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNGINX Plus
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
Makes our life easy as application admins in securing our applications and making them accessible. We can easily add an application within a few minutes and define the backend servers right away.
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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
  • APIGW
  • Policy Enforcement
  • Centrally Manage API Traffic
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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
  • An AI bot would be cool to help build config files
  • More webinars for advanced NGINX Plus would be great
  • GUI tool... might already be one available
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
We just love work with f5
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F5
No reason not to renew it, we are happy with it.
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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
Very easy to use
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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
We had an issue after upgrading from RHEL 7 to 8, and there were some issues that the security team imposed upon the platform with a scanning tool. We also had a VXLAN environment that was not properly sending a gratuitous arp to the network. NGINX support was instrumental to speedily resolving our issue.
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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
The API and dashboard alone make NGINX Plus a better choice.
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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
  • We are planning by using NGINX it can greatly reduce our OPEX by 50% "just our own running APIGW" the cascading effects in the long run will be much more.
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ScreenShots