F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Score 9.1 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
NGINX
Score 9.7 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 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
Features
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
-
Ratings
NGINX
7.9
24 Ratings
0% below category average
IDE support00 Ratings7.512 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings7.920 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings7.120 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.020 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.921 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings7.118 Ratings
Best Alternatives
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
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Score 8.8 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
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Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
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Score 8.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(144 ratings)
9.4
(51 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.4
(9 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.3
(3 ratings)
8.6
(4 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
Online Training
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 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)NGINX
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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F5
[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
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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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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
  • Better integration between different F5 solutions
  • Fail over between devices feels unstable if there are thousands of objects attached to the traffic-group. Needs to be more simpler.
  • We have seen issues with malicious user detection where we have used open protocols due to legacy applications, and have been caught with legitimate traffic being blocked.
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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 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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F5
Great value for the 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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F5
Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
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Reliability and Availability
F5
Seems no issue
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F5
No answers on this topic
Performance
F5
Unnoticed slowness
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F5
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
F5
I never contacted support for this product.
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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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Online Training
F5
Online training saves me lots of time
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F5
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
F5
Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.
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F5
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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F5
We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
  • we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
  • we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
  • individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely
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Scalability
F5
Dont see any issue so far
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F5
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
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F5
  • Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
  • Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
  • Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.
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ScreenShots

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of

NGINX Screenshots

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