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AWS WAF vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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 ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS WAF is 4.8%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.7%
AWS WAF4.8%
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service1.0%
Other89.5%
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.
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.
Tarandeep Kaur - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Manager at Flash.co
Security management has reduced ransomware risk and now protects cloud workloads efficiently
The best features that Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service offers are an intuitive centralized dashboard, allowing us to manage policies, Internet protocol servers, antiviruses, anti-DDoS attacks, and traffic shaping across multiple sites. This feature enables seamless scaling of our environments, especially as we work within Amazon Web Services. Additionally, real-time threat intelligence helps us to detect threats in real-time. Another major feature I love is application control and VPN support, providing granular visibility and protection without needing separate appliances. The centralized dashboard is helping us streamline visibility across our admin panels and provides site-to-site visibility deployed directly to our AWS environment, securing VPC traffic and ensuring the firewall is in place. The real-time threat intelligence is an advanced feature helping us track real-time attacks, such as anti-DDoS attacks, ransomware, or viruses that can compromise system integrity. Through the intuitive centralized dashboard, we can manage policies and set rules, assisting us effectively.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It protects web applications efficiently."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"For us, the key feature of Cloudflare is DDoS protection and IP hiding, especially since we are a crypto company."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"It is configurable via API."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"As a basic WAF, it's better than nothing. So if you need something simple out of the box with default features, AWS WAF is good."
"The initial setup was very straightforward. Deployment took about ten minutes or less."
"It has improved our organization a lot because before we were having problems with access management, things have gotten better using this product, it is protecting the files, it has been the best step for us, we are no longer having problems with unauthorized access, where somebody breaches the system or compromises documents, and nothing like that has happened over the past year that we have been using this product."
"I hope that the solution continues to improve, but for me, it's perfect right now."
"The cloud-native nature of AWS is crucial since most of our workload is in AWS, making AWS WAF native to Amazon Web Services."
"We have received good support from the customer service and support team."
"We do not have to maintain the solution."
"I believe the most impressive features are integration and ease of use, and the best part of AWS WAF is the cloud-native WAF integration, where AWS maintains everything and all we have to do is click the button and WAF will be activated so any packet coming through the internet will be filtered through."
"I like its ability to identify known attacks, including DDOS attacks, because application attacks are evolving all the time and, when it comes to software-as-a-service, we need to have software that knows about all the latest attacks and also protects against major unknown attacks."
"The most valuable features of the solution are it is plug and play, has automated policies, a simple configuration, and is easy to create rules."
"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"
"Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service's real-time attack detection feature has improved our customers' threat response strategies significantly."
"It provides an ease of policy management."
"The most valuable features of the solution are it is plug and play, has automated policies, a simple configuration, and is easy to create rules."
"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."
"Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service has positively impacted our organization by reducing cyber threats like ransomware and phishing by ninety-five percent."
 

Cons

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"The reporting could be more granular."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"The solution could be more reliable."
"The serverless product from AWS WAF could be improved. For example, they have only one serverless series, Lambda, but they should extend and improve it. Additionally, the firewall rules are not very easy to configure."
"In a future release of this solution, I would like to see additional management features to make things simpler."
"I find the documentation somewhat complex to implement during the initial stages."
"The solution is cloud-based, and therefore the billing model that comes with it could be more intuitive, in my opinion. It's very easy to not fully understand how you tag things for billing and then you can quite easily run up a high bill without realizing it. The solution needs to be more intuitive around the tagging system, which enables the billing. Right now, I have a cloud architect that does that on our behalf and it isn't something that a business user could use because it still requires quite a lot of technical knowledge to do effectively."
"I am not satisfied with AWS technical support."
"The setup is complicated."
"The default content policy available in the tool is not very strong compared to the competitors."
"One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy."
"We found it a bit slow when accessing it through the web browser. The URL also exposed the user name and the hashed password. When I log into my Barracuda WAF user portal, I could see the username and the hashed password on the URL itself. So, it is not very secure, and it is important to take that off."
"The solution can improve by bundling Security Operation Center (SOC) with the WAF-as-a-Service, it would provide a lot more value to customers."
"We found it a bit slow when accessing it through the web browser."
"The price of their licensing model is a bit steep, and the pricing and SIEM integration sometimes create challenges, and we need to get professional help with those areas."
"The solution can improve by bundling Security Operation Center (SOC) with the WAF-as-a-Service, it would provide a lot more value to customers."
"It's a very specific solution that is only requested for a customer's web code or their global IT policy."
"The stability of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The solution is expensive."
"It is not too pricey."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is high price, and ten is low price"
"AWS is not that costly by comparison. They are maybe close to $40 per month. I think it was between $29 or $39."
"The pricing should be more affordable, especially as it pertains to small clients."
"AWS WAF is pay-as-you-go, I only pay for what I'm using. There is no subscription or any payment upfront, I can terminate use at any time. Which is an advantage."
"The price of AWS WAF is reasonable, it is not expensive and it is not cheap."
"For Kubernetes microservices, AWS is more expensive compared to OCI. AWS costs approximately 70 cents per hour, while OCI is 50% cheaper."
"It has a variable pricing scheme."
"It's an annual subscription."
"It's very difficult for me to give an estimate of the cost. All I know is that we sell the box itself as a service."
"The product is expensive but it offers flexible pricing. It could be affordable."
"I rate the product's price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high. There are no additional costs to be paid apart from the standard licensing fees attached to the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
11%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise27
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise2
 

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...
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 do you like most about AWS WAF?
The most valuable feature of AWS WAF is its highly configurable rules system.
What needs improvement with Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
I assess the impact of Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service on compliance efforts regarding security events as good in terms of...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
I deal with Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service and usually recommend it for private and government companies.
What advice do you have for others considering Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
The price of their licensing model is a bit steep, but for other features such as web application threat detection an...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
AWS Web Application Firewall
Barracuda WAF as a Service
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
eVitamins, 9Splay, Senao International
Salvation Army
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS WAF vs. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.