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AWS WAF vs Human Defense Platform 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 ...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (7th)
AWS WAF
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th)
Human Defense Platform
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Fraud Detection and Prevention (31st), Bot Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS WAF5.3%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.1%
Fortinet FortiWeb7.5%
Other79.1%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Fraud Detection and Prevention Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Human Defense Platform1.3%
ThreatMetrix6.4%
BioCatch4.0%
Other88.3%
Fraud Detection and Prevention
 

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.
it_user785406 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager/Team Leader at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
They ensure that our campaigns have run in the highest quality of settings, leading to savings on ad spending
Primary use case of this solution is to detect fraud traffic (also mark the network which is sending the fraud traffic) and block the fraud traffic. These metrics help us to minimize wasted ad spend and provide our clients an extra layer of confidence around our campaigns As a result of the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"The impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."
"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to limit access based on geographical location by restricting specific IP addresses."
"The solution is stable."
"The product’s availability, ease of configuration, and documentation are valuable."
"The customizable features are good."
"The most valuable feature of AWS WAF is the extra layer of security that I have when connecting to my web applications."
"Its best feature is that it is on the cloud and does not require local hardware resources."
"The initial setup was very straightforward. Deployment took about ten minutes or less."
"AWS WAF has helped to strengthen the security of my environment; it has also helped to improve the posture of our application, prevent all DDoS attacks and unnecessary traffic and SQL injection that is reducing the performance of our application."
"PerimeterX helped us to ensure that our campaigns have run in the highest quality of settings, leading to savings on ad spending."
 

Cons

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"Its stability could be better."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"The reporting could be more granular."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"They have to do more to improve, to innovate more features. They need to increase the security. It has to be more active in detecting threats."
"I find the documentation somewhat complex to implement during the initial stages."
"I'd like to see improvements in its usability and functionality. I'm also concerned about being too dependent on the cloud provider's WAF version. For security, using multiple vendors and not putting all our eggs in one basket is better."
"They should work to define more threats, add more security, and make it more compliant with more security companies."
"On the UI side, I would like it if they could bring back the geolocation view on the corner."
"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."
"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."
"The product should improve the DDoS-related features."
"As bots are getting better and the product should keep getting updates in preventing new ways of attack and security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"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."
"It is not too pricey."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The price is average."
"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"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."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven or eight out of ten."
"It's an annual subscription."
"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."
"We are kind of doing a POC comparison to see what works best. Pricing-wise, AWS is one of the most attractive ones. It is fairly cheap, and we like the pricing part. We're trying to see what makes more sense operation-wise, license-wise, and pricing-wise."
"The price of AWS WAF is expensive if you do not know how to manage your software up or down. I price of the solution is average amongst the other competitors but it would be better if it was less expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
University
11%
 

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 Enterprise26
No data available
 

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.
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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
AWS Web Application Firewall
PerimeterX Bot Defender, BotGuard for Applications, HUMAN MediaGuard
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
eVitamins, 9Splay, Senao International
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Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: March 2026.
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