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

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/AF5 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 Azure

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

    $29

    per month

    Pricing
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft Azure
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Developer
    $29
    per month
    Standard
    $100
    per month
    Professional Direct
    $1000
    per month
    Basic
    Free
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft Azure
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details—The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft Azure
    Considered Both Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    98%
    Would buy again
    178 Answers
    92%
    Would buy again
    34 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    158 Answers
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    174 Answers
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    35 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    129 Answers
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    24 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    142 Answers
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    34 Answers
    Features
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft Azure
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) and Microsoft Azure
    Feature
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Azure
    8.4
    27 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings8.126 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.725 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing00 Ratings8.624 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.225 Ratings
    Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.326 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.424 Ratings
    Operating system support00 Ratings8.926 Ratings
    Security controls00 Ratings8.626 Ratings
    Automation00 Ratings8.224 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft Azure
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    IBM Cloud Object Storage
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)Microsoft Azure
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.2
    (180 ratings)
    8.7
    (96 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.7
    (11 ratings)
    10.0
    (17 ratings)
    Usability
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    8.3
    (36 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    6.8
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    Online Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.6
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 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 Azure
    Likelihood to Recommend
    F5
    It is doing its job effectively, and its scalability is superb. So, if you have a mixed environment with cloud and on-premise systems to protect this product, provide a solution to the challenge. However, its management is more suited to DevOps teams rather than to the ones responsible for on-premise systems, making the management a bit more complex.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
    • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
    • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
    • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
    • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
    • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    F5
    Seems no issue
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    F5
    Unnoticed slowness
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    F5
    I never contacted support for this product.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    F5
    Online training saves me lots of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    F5
    Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    F5
    The other one that I've used in the past, they're very similar and I haven't used it recently, so I can't do a side-by-side comparison today. But I can say that F5 does everything we want it to do consistent with what this other product did do and it's got enhanced features and of course we have a long history with F5 as a product set in general.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    F5
    Dont see any issue so far
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
    • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
    • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshot