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Azure Front Door vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) 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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Azure Front Door
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
CDN (2nd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (8th), Microsoft Security Suite (12th)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (26th)
 

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.
Thomas Zebar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides great security with a good application firewall
The initial setup is straightforward. If you want to use the portal, CLI, or PowerShare, or you want to use automation data for one month, it's straightforward. Even when it comes to operational maintenance, it's pretty easy and straightforward. Microsoft has done a great job on that front. Maintenance generally requires someone who is a cloud administrator or similar to maintain services in general, with Front Door a small piece of a larger maintenance requirement. There's not a lot to manage, the configuration is simple. I encourage people to document the configuration and infrastructure as well as disaster recovery in case anything happens.
Archana Heeralal - PeerSpot reviewer
A good solution to implement web application firewall for applications
There are some lags in Signal Sciences for the web application firewalls. Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic. There is a little bit of complexity with custom rules that should be removed. Signal Sciences should add a feature called rate limiting with multiple options, wherein I can create a rate limiting based on the cookie request or the IP.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"It's very user-friendly."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"I am impressed with the tool's integrations."
"The tool is easy to use for beginners."
"The solution is good."
"The most valuable feature is that you can implement resources globally. It does not depend on location and ability or something like that. This is to connect clients around the world."
"Azure Front Door provides DDoS protection and features related to WAF."
"You can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."
"Rules Engine is a valuable feature."
"The price is one of the most important aspects of the product. It's quite affordable."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
 

Cons

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"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."
"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"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."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"My suggestion for improvement would be to enhance the Data Export feature to include specific tables, particularly the Azure Diagnostics table."
"The product's features are limited compared to Cloudflare. The tool also doesn't work well in a hybrid environment. I would like to see a way to add personalized APIs in the system."
"There could be improvements regarding its pricing for large-scale projects."
"We should be able to use Front Door defenders with multiple cloud vendors. Currently, they can be used only with the Azure cloud. Azure Front Door should also be able to do global load balancing and provide internal front door services. Microsoft should clearly define what Traffic Manager, Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door products do. These are similar products, and people get confused between these products."
"There is room for improvement and they're working on it."
"There's a limitation on the amount of global rules we can add."
"This is a relatively expensive solution."
"In the tool, there needs to be a good amount of monitoring in the area of health probes to capture in front of what is happening."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"We are using the free version."
"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."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"The product is expensive."
"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."
"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."
"Considering the standard licensing of the tool, even though we have not checked the billing as of now, it might not be very costly."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
 

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's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Front Door?
Azure Front Door is cheaper for small projects, companies, or applications compared to using separate tools.
What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Azure Front-Door
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Front Door vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.