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Airlock vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
Airlock
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
9.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (20th)
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Tiodor Jovovic - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Bonieber  Orofeo - PeerSpot reviewer
Identifying compromised traffic and securing data has been a significant advantage
One of the most beneficial features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) ( /products/f5-big-ip-local-traffic-manager-ltm-reviews ) is its ability to identify compromised traffic and its capabilities in authentication. Additionally, the security aspect of it provides a significant advantage as it helps us secure our data, which is a major investment and benefit for us. Before using this system, we had difficulties in storing our data and managing the traffic that comes in and out.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"It's very user-friendly."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Our experience has been very good, in terms of performance, and securing our application infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature is customization."
"The solution's stability is pretty good."
"The load balancing function, the monitors that you can create, and iRules programmability are most valuable."
"The occasion in which we needed technical support, we didn't have problems with them, because they always answered our questions without any trouble."
"We're able to do load balancing and global load balancing. When you marry those two products together, you can do a lot more. We're able to deliver our applications more securely and faster. It has improved our deliverability where we have more service across the shared data centers. We can intelligently reach all of those client connections across all of the servers and do it fairly quickly. It has helped improve our application delivery and performance."
"The Local Traffic Manager (LTM) provides a simple low balance and SSL decryption, in addition to some TCP parameters, for incoming and outgoing traffic to redirect appropriate traffic patterns to appropriate servers."
 

Cons

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"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 tool must be simplified."
"The cost of the solution is pretty high. It would be ideal if it was more reasonable."
"Native support for containers should be added to future releases, as this is the future of load balancing."
"In terms of native integrations, there is a lot of instability. Also, integration is not robust with F5."
"The web interface could be better."
"I would like there to be more device security. I would like the tool to support SSL links, along with SSL and TLS."
"One area for improvement with F5 BIG-IP LTM could be its pricing, which some may find on the higher side."
"The UI could be improved."
"In terms of pricing, it could be more competitive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"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."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The tool is cheap."
"This product is costly from a licensing perspective considering its competitors."
"BIG-IP LTM isn't a cheap solution - I'd rate its pricing as three out of five."
"The solution is more expensive than one of its competitors."
"It could be priced a little less, especially on the virtual side. It gets a bit expensive, but you get what you pay."
"This is a high-priced tool. We pay for its license yearly."
"Try to negotiate all the software features that you require upfront."
"LTM is a good product, but it's expensive. They should make it more competitive because cloud providers offer free load balancing. Cloud providers can't cover all the security aspects of F5, but you get a decent amount of security. Cloud environments are becoming the norm across the IT industry. Many of the larger companies that previously used on-prem infrastructure are switching to the cloud, so companies like Fortinet and Palo Alto are reducing their prices. Otherwise, they can't compete in the cloud."
"F5 BIG-IP can be expensive, although there are trial versions available which are helpful to find out if the solution is right for your company."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
10%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What do you like most about Airlock?
Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Airlock?
The tool is cheap. We are protecting very sensitive portals. We didn't have a single incident for the last 15 years.
What needs improvement with Airlock?
The tool must be simplified. However, if it is simplified, it will lose its competitive edge. The solution requires a...
What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP?
The price needs improvement as it is quite costly.
What is your primary use case for F5 BIG-IP?
We're using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) ( /products/f5-big-ip-local-traffic-manager-ltm-reviews ) for our a...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Airlock Suite
F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Raiffeisen, SGKB, Generali, Visana
Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5, Microsoft and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: May 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.