Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall comparison

Microsoft and Cloudflare are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Microsoft is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.4, while Cloudflare is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5. Additionally, 92% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Cloudflare users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall and Azure Web Application Firewall compete in the field of web application security solutions. Cloudflare gains an advantage in pricing and support, while Azure is favored for its extensive feature set and integration capabilities.

Features: Cloudflare Web Application Firewall offers ease of configuration, advanced DDoS protection, and robust integration with its Cloud Suite. Azure Web Application Firewall provides deep integration with Azure services, customizable rule sets, and efficient security controls.

Room for Improvement: Cloudflare can enhance its advanced rate-limiting features, improve specific subscription offerings, and expand data center presence further. Azure Web Application Firewall could improve the speed of customer service response times and simplify the complexity of its configuration process for easier adoption.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare provides a seamless deployment process and responsive technical support, suitable for businesses of any size. Azure's setup can be more complex due to its integration with the Azure ecosystem, sometimes posing challenges but offering a detailed deployment guide.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare is known for its cost-effectiveness and straightforward pricing model, often resulting in higher ROI due to ease of deployment and low ongoing costs. Azure, while starting off with a higher investment, provides significant value through its comprehensive security features, beneficial for enterprises needing advanced protection.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

April 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Mrigendra Kumar

Senior Specialist - Azure Cloud at HCL Technologies Ltd

Easy to understand with good support and an easy initial setup

We're just monitoring post-configuration. The monitoring is good. It was pretty much issue-free. It's quite a stable product and works well with Microsoft products. The initial setup is very easy. It's scalable. Technical support is helpful. This is a trustworthy product. Microsoft is well-known and respected around the world. There are a lot of features, including features for standard and premium deployments. Small businesses can use the product and easily move up as they grow.

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Hitesh R

Solutions Architect at Amazure Technologies Private Limited

With just the basic understanding of networking and security, one can use this solution easily

I find the deployment process for Cloudflare's firewall to be very smooth. Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes. The deployment of a new domain on Cloudflare can be completed within 15 minutes if the necessary administrative authority and support from the DNS team are available during the process. It also includes the time needed for domain registration. We are working for an ITSM organization and have multiple administrators. During the deployment phase of the solution in the organization, we have limited the number of administrators to just five to ten individuals. We also arranged a few KT sessions to help the company employees who are involved in working with this solution. As of now, they have started working on the tool.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"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."

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

More Cloudflare pros

"It is almost impossible to access these assets from outside, requiring a very skilled attacker to obtain asset tokens of a customer using Azure."

"Configuration is much easier than using different platforms."

"It's a good option if you want a solution that's ready to go and easy for your team to learn. It's cloud-based, so you don't need to buy or maintain any hardware infrastructure."

"The integration it has with GitHub is great."

"The return on investment is good."

"It's great for protecting against DDoS attacks."

"The initial setup is easy and straightforward...Azure Web Application Firewall is a scalable product."

"It's quite a stable product and works well with Microsoft products."

More Azure Web Application Firewall pros

"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."

"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."

"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"The setup process is very simple for me."

"It protects web applications efficiently."

"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"DNS Management."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

More Cloudflare cons

"The management can be improved."

"In Brazil, we have some problems with the phone service that affect our connection with the cloud. However, it isn't common."

"The support for proxy forwarding could improve."

"Deployment should be simplified so that a non-techie can handle it."

"We would like to see additional site services using AI to provide information about blocking requests and offer analytics on the origin of calls."

"From my point of view, there is no need for improvement."

"From a reporting perspective, they could do more there."

"Some Azure applications, like the web application firewall, require a certain level of SKU for hosting setup. The basic setup does not allow me to use the web application firewall and other additional services."

More Azure Web Application Firewall cons

"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."

"Its stability could be better."

"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

"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."

"Support can be challenging at times."

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"The price is reasonable."

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"We are using the free version."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"A free version of the solution is available."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"I give the pricing a nine out of ten."

"We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft and the pricing is good."

"Azure WAF has price advantages over other WAF solutions. The pricing model is flexible because you pay on a scale based on the level of protection you need."

"The price is for this solution is fair and there is a license needed."

"The price is reasonable. It is approximately $2,000 US per month."

"The price of the solution depends on your architecture and how you manage it. You can control the cost in Azure quite well. The costs do not directly correlate to expenses in the features we are using."

"The solution is expensive."

"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."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"It is not too pricey."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Educational Organization

19%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Azure Web Application Firewall?

The integration it has with GitHub is great.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Web Application Firewall?

The pricing is okay at the moment. Sometimes, when opting for a higher SKU, it's not the WAF itself that's costly but...

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What needs improvement with Azure Web Application Firewall?

While using it, I identified certain areas where it would have been good to have additional features. Right now, I ca...

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What do you like most about Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The product has a valuable security control functionality.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available. This improvement wo...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

AWS WAF vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 36% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Azure Web Application Firewall Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 17% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 16% of the time

AWS WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Fastly vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

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Cloudflare

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

May 2025

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Cloudflare WAF

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides centralized protection of your web applications from common exploits and vulnerabilities. Web applications are increasingly targeted by malicious attacks that exploit commonly known vulnerabilities. SQL injection and cross-site scripting are among the most common attacks.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Information Not Available

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

April 2025

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