F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) vs. Microsoft IIS

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF leverages F5's Advanced WAF technology, delivering WAF-as-a-Service and combining signature- and behavior-based protection for web applications. It acts as an intermediate proxy to inspect application requests and responses to block and mitigate a broad spectrum of risks stemming from the OW ASP Top 10, persistent and coordinated threat campaigns, bots, and layer 7 DoS.N/A
Microsoft IIS
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft IIS is an application server and infrastructure.N/A
Pricing
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft IIS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft IIS
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft IIS
Features
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft IIS
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
-
Ratings
Microsoft IIS
8.2
29 Ratings
3% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings8.020 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.029 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings7.029 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings9.029 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings10.029 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings7.018 Ratings
Best Alternatives
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft IIS
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
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Score 8.9 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft IIS
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(124 ratings)
6.0
(29 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.4
(9 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.2
(3 ratings)
6.0
(10 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
7.8
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
9.4
(6 ratings)
Online Training
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft IIS
Likelihood to Recommend
F5
It helps our website to manage well during high traffic seasons and Holidays. This plaform manages the website overall performance and also protect it against DDoS attacks during these High demand period. It also protects transactions done on our website for the booking of services and products buying by our customers and keep their data safe.
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Microsoft
Publishing applications or websites is easy with Microsoft IIS. You don't need external software or complicated tutorials involving command lines and editing configuration files. On other hand, sometimes the troubleshooter needs a high knowledge of Windows Server, Registry, and tools to debug the application. If you need to host non-Microsoft technology as PHP pages or have a low budget, I recommend IIS equivalent software as Apache.
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Pros
F5
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
  • IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
  • IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.
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Cons
F5
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Angular/node apps don't run on IIS, or at least we never figured out how. Rather we ended up using nginx.
  • There are still occasional memory leaks - check your recycle settings!
  • If you have very heavy usage for web APIs, IIS requires regular restarts for reasons unknown.
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
We gave it an 8 because it protects our web apps well and is reliable. The WAF is flexible and meets most of our needs. It could improve in user interface and make integrations easier, but overall, it’s a solid and effective security tool for us.
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Microsoft
We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.
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Usability
F5
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.
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Microsoft
As I've mentioned earlier, Microsoft IIS is very simple and easy to use. The user interface is a little bit overloaded with a huge number of different options, but once you have a little clue of what you are doing and what you need - no issues at all.
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Reliability and Availability
F5
Seems no issue
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Microsoft
ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.
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Performance
F5
Unnoticed slowness
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Microsoft
In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.
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Support Rating
F5
I never contacted support for this product.
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Microsoft
As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.
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Online Training
F5
Online training saves me lots of time
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
F5
Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
F5
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.
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Microsoft
Apache is java. Java is unnecessary complex. No developer wants to invest in learning all the hundreds of text based configuration files to get something done. Also, apache gives you the most evil and un-usable user interface possible. [Microsoft] IIS makes [life] after development easy, which is already complex enough to be bothered by something as mundane as exposing your work over the internet.
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Scalability
F5
Dont see any issue so far
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Microsoft
Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.
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Return on Investment
F5
  • The biggest gain for us was speed. Before F5 Distributed Cloud WAF, onboarding a new app to our WAF stack meant manual rule tuning, traffic sampling and regression testing. Right now, we spin up a service, tag it with the right policy and its ready (production ready) within hours
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Microsoft
  • Allowing us to internally host our monitoring websites allows quick access to data that can be quite hidden, saving developer time.
  • It was inexpensive compared to more bulky solutions saving upfront cost.
  • It’s easy to install and enable allowing more developer savings.
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ScreenShots

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) Screenshots

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