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AWS WAF vs Airlock comparison

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Executive Summary

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 ...
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Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Airlock
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
41st
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
9.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 3.8%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Airlock is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS WAF is 4.2%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall3.8%
AWS WAF4.2%
Airlock0.7%
Other91.3%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
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.
Tiodor Jovovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Business Officer at Sky Express
Provides endless features and can be adapted to every single application that exists in the world
WAF is the most beneficial feature for security posture. Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product. The level of detail of the configuration is the most significant aspect. We can adapt it to every single application that exists in the world. The product helps with the compliance processes.
Azam S M - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC
Has successfully filtered malicious traffic and allowed country-specific access controls
For improvement in AWS WAF, we can have better monitoring. One of the things that should be improved in AWS WAF is the monitoring; we need to identify the requests and where they are coming from. If it's a bot, we should differentiate the requests, whether they are automated or not. The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information. We also need a feature where we can filter specific requests. If there are scripts in the requests, we should be able to filter those requests to see if there are any scripts running from them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."
"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."
"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product."
"AWS WAF has positively impacted our organization by improving our defense from our WAF firewalling the web application, including production and non-production environments."
"We integrate AWS WAF with several platforms within cloud hosting and other security solutions and provisions in our business. Regarding AI, it's been around for about 20 years, so it's not new. It's just a new buzzword. I've been in security for 30 years and remember using AI when I started 25-30 years ago. We have multiple forms of AI within our business."
"One of the most valuable features of AWS WAF is its ability to filter web app traffic, allowing us to specify conditions such as IP addresses and HTTP headers."
"As a basic WAF, it's better than having nothing, so if you need something simple out of the box with default features, AWS WAF is good."
"The cloud-native nature of AWS is crucial since most of our workload is in AWS, making AWS WAF native to Amazon Web Services."
"The most valuable feature is the way it blocks threats to external applications."
"Rule groups are valuable."
"We do have a lot of external applications which are exposed to the internet and WAF provides protection for them."
 

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."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."
"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 rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."
"The tool must be simplified."
"I am not satisfied with AWS technical support."
"One area for improvement in AWS WAF could be the limitation on the number of rules, particularly those from third-party sources, within the free tier."
"The solution is cloud-based, and therefore the billing model that comes with it could be more intuitive, in my opinion."
"There is room for improvement in pricing."
"I would like to see the addition of more advanced rate-limiting features in the next release. It would be beneficial to extend rate limiting beyond just web servers to the main node level."
"When users choose the free service, there isn't great support available to them."
"The main difference with other similar products is the security efficiency against the type of attacks because normally Amazon works with certain types of attacks and is unable to deal with most of the more sophisticated new attacks that are now the market."
"We must monitor and clean up the WAF manually."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"The solution is expensive."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"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."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The tool is cheap."
"The pricing should be more affordable, especially as it pertains to small clients."
"The price is average."
"You need an additional AWS subscription for this product if you are buying a managed tool."
"It's quite affordable. It's in the middle."
"The solution's cost depends on the use cases."
"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"Its price is fair. There is a very fair amount that they charge. It has a pay-as-you-go model, so it pretty much depends on how much a user uses it. As per the cloud norms, the more you use, the more you pay. I would rate it a five out of ten in terms of pricing."
"It's an annual subscription."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise28
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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What are the limitations of AWS WAF vs alternative WAFs?
Hi Varun, I have had experienced with several WAF deployments and deep technical assessments of the following: 1. Im...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS WAF?
AWS WAF is affordable; it depends on the number of rules you apply. The licensing cost for AWS WAF is just pay-as-you...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
Airlock Suite
AWS Web Application Firewall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Raiffeisen, SGKB, Generali, Visana
eVitamins, 9Splay, Senao International
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Fortinet, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.