Aikido Security vs Cloudflare comparison

Aikido Security and Cloudflare are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Additionally, 100% of Aikido Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Cloudflare users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Aikido Security and Cloudflare based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Fortinet, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF).

To learn more, read our detailed Web Application Firewall (WAF) Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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B Goswami

Product Manager at Zidio development

Security has shifted left and now catches vulnerabilities early in our development workflow

There are a few areas for improvement. The first is scan speed. For large repositories, initial scans can be slow. Incremental scanning helps, but full scans still take considerable time. The second thing is the false positive rate. While Auto-Triage is good, it is not perfect. Occasionally, genuine issues get filtered out and real false positives slip through. The third one is remediation guidance. Aikido Security tells you what is vulnerable, but sometimes the fix suggestions are generic. More specific, actionable remediation steps would save developer time. The fourth one is IDE integrations. It currently works best in CI/CD pipelines. A proper VS Code or JetBrains plugin for real-time scanning while coding would be a significant improvement. From a customer point of view, the following things could change. The first thing is documentation for custom rules. Aikido Security allows you to create custom scanning rules, but the documentation for this feature is surprisingly thin. I spent considerable time in community forums and with trial and error just to configure basic custom rules. Step-by-step guides with real-world examples would make this feature much more accessible. The second thing is better Slack and communication integrations. Currently, security alerts come through email and dashboard notifications, but our team lives in Slack. A more configurable Slack integration that sends contextual alerts directly to the relevant developer, not just a generic channel notification, would dramatically improve response time. The third one is historical trend reporting. While Aikido Security shows current vulnerability status well, generating historical reports showing security posture improvement over time is limited. For presenting security progress to management or stakeholders, better exportable trend reports would be very valuable.

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M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."

"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

"I have not had any issues with this solution, and I would recommend it to others who are interested in using it."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The biggest win with Aikido Security was reducing context switching, as developers previously received vulnerability reports from multiple tools and tried to figure out ownership manually, and now most findings are visible in one place."

"Aikido Security has positively impacted my organization significantly because initially we were thinking it would take a month for us to achieve SOC 2 compliance again, and with Aikido Security, we were able to get all codebase vulnerability fixes within a week for all our 13 or 14 repositories that we had."

"Aikido Security nests directly in our development workflow and it catches security issues before they reach production."

"Since switching to Aikido Security, I have noticed a positive impact on my team's productivity with measurable results, as we now have measurements."

"Aikido Security saved me several hours each week by automating vulnerability scanning and security checks, reducing the need for manual review and helping me focus on more development."

"If someone is looking for a secure and optimized wrapper over an open website, I would suggest CloudFlare services."

"The overall performance of this solution is what makes it one of the best solutions on the market."

"It's a reasonably priced solution that meets customers' needs and it's not too difficult to deploy."

"I have not had a DDOS attack since, or at least not become unavailable due to DDOS which means my ROI is pretty good."

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"CloudFlare's caching brings the load speed down from 4.32 seconds to 2.45 seconds."

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

More Cloudflare pros

Cons

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."

"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."

"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."

"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."

"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"There are a few areas for improvement. The first is scan speed; for large repositories, initial scans can be slow, and while incremental scanning helps, full scans still take considerable time."

"I think Aikido Security could be improved by addressing its Jira integration, which I feel needs a bit of work."

"However, there was one minor issue that I faced. When I had a UUID for an object in the code, Aikido Security was considering it as a secret key, which it was not."

"I think Aikido Security could be improved with more detailed remediation guidance, such as additional beginner-friendly tutorials and enhanced customization for alerts and reporting."

"The biggest challenge with Aikido Security initially was the alert volume, as connecting everything could result in hundreds or thousands of findings."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"DNS Management."

"Yes, there were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side."

"The installation was complex until I learned what I had to learn."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"Several features that I think is essential is not available in the free and business package."

More Cloudflare cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"It is not too pricey."

"The solution is expensive."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"We are using the free version."

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	1

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	26

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Aikido Security?

I think Aikido Security could be improved by addressing its Jira integration, which I feel needs a bit of work. For m...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Aikido Security?

My main use case for Aikido Security is to utilize it as part of our vulnerability management program, where we also ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Aikido Security?

Since switching to Aikido Security, I have noticed a positive impact on my team's productivity with measurable result...

See all answers

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 5% of the time

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SonarQube vs Aikido Security

Compared 9% of the time

Snyk vs Aikido Security

Compared 8% of the time

Semgrep vs Aikido Security

Compared 8% of the time

GitHub vs Aikido Security

Compared 6% of the time

Veracode vs Aikido Security

Compared 4% of the time

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Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 37% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Fastly vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

June 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

May 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

June 2026

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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

Cloudflare DNS

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall integrates DDoS protection, load balancing, and firewall capabilities. Its ease of use, configurability, and robust security measures make it a versatile choice for protecting web applications.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive defense against threats with advanced reporting and robust security measures. It includes DNS integration, rate limiting, and extensive rule sets, all within a SaaS model that allows API configurability. Users value its caching, scalability, and pricing, although enhancements are needed in rate-limiting and third-party integration. Improvements in customer support, especially in India, real-time controls, and user documentation are also desired. Users seek a more intuitive dashboard, better log management, and improved alert systems, along with multitenancy capabilities and enhanced reporting.

What are the key features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

DDoS Protection: Shields applications from denial-of-service attacks
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution
DNS Integration: Enhances domain name system security
Rate Limiting: Controls traffic flow and reduces abuse
Extensive Rule Sets: Offers customizable security rules

What benefits and ROI can users find in reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing business needs
Pricing: Offers reasonable pricing structure
Caching: Improves application performance and speed
Configurable Security: Provides customizable defense settings
Efficient Management: Simplifies security and application control

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall finds application in industries like banking and retail by acting as a comprehensive security gateway, managing authentication and authorization while protecting web applications from malicious Layer 7 traffic. It also implements load balancing, CDN, and zero-trust policies, supported by advanced reporting, analytics tools, and threat scoring to meet specific industry needs.

Cloudflare

Aikido Security is the no-nonsense platform that empowers developers by centralizing code-to-cloud security issues and providing rapid guidance for fixing vulnerabilities.

With over 6,000 teams utilizing its features, Aikido Security prioritizes effective security management by consolidating 11 comprehensive scans into one platform. This approach translates complex vulnerabilities into understandable insights, targeting non-enterprise SaaS businesses with engineering teams of 10-500 developers. It focuses on delivering security management without excessive costs or complexity through a product-led growth model.

What are the standout features of Aikido Security?

SAST: Secures code as it is written.
DAST: Monitors surfaces, dynamically tests for vulnerabilities with OWASP ZAP.
IaC: Detects infrastructure vulnerabilities.
CSPM: Real-time detection of cloud infrastructure risks.
Container Scanning: Assesses container environments for risky packages.
Secrets Detection: Identifies exposed API keys, passwords.
Open Source Dependencies: Analyzes dependencies to avoid vulnerabilities.
Open Source License: Maps and exports SBOMs to manage license risks.
Malware Detection: Protects from supply chain attacks.
Runtime Protection: Secures apps with an embedded firewall.
Custom Scans: Integrates with existing tools like SonarQube.

Why should you consider Aikido Security?

Easy Adoption: Setup takes less than 3 minutes with clear UX.
Cost Efficiency: Offers a comprehensive 9-in-1 solution at competitive pricing.
Accurate Results: Best false positive reduction in the market.

In industries like software development and cloud services, Aikido Security is implemented to provide clear insights, enabling teams to focus on rapid product growth while maintaining robust security. Its product-led growth strategy, including a freemium offering, allows developers to experience benefits firsthand without initial investment.

Aikido Security

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

FinTech GoCardless ZIP CertifID HealthTech Dental Intelligence PE & Group Techstars Cronos Group Security Tech Human Security Tines HR Tech Simployer Recruitee Agency November Five Other Lighthouse (Hospitality Tech) Smokeball (LegalTech) Runna (B2C Tech) GEA Group (Manufacturing) Community fibre (Telecom) n8n (Software Development)

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2026

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