Azure Web Application Firewall vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

Microsoft and Fastly are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Microsoft is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.4, while Fastly is ranked #27 with an average rating of 7.7. Additionally, 92% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 50% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly Next-Gen WAF and Azure Web Application Firewall compete in addressing web application security vulnerabilities. Fastly Next-Gen WAF shows an advantage in agility and analytics, while Azure Web Application Firewall excels in Microsoft's ecosystem integration.

Features: Fastly Next-Gen WAF provides real-time threat detection, blocking mechanisms, and customizable settings. Azure Web Application Firewall offers comprehensive integration, extensive security management features, and compatibility within Microsoft’s cloud platforms.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly Next-Gen WAF is praised for its quick and flexible setup, easily adapting to various environments. Azure Web Application Firewall offers seamless integration within Azure but may be less flexible for non-Azure users. Azure’s customer support is more structured, especially for existing Azure customers.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly Next-Gen WAF is cost-effective, providing quick ROI for those requiring agile solutions. Azure Web Application Firewall demands a substantial initial investment, targeting enterprises seeking extensive integration and justifying costs with long-term value from Microsoft services.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

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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Mano Senaratne

Management Consultant at a consultancy with 201-500 employees

Comprehensive suite simplifies configuration while frequent updates require management

Mainly, it comes with the complete suite of Microsoft services. I can use it in conjunction with the best options and other features that come with it. Configuration is much easier than using different platforms. For example, if I have hosted the application in AWS and am using the Application Firewall from Azure, there are certain additional steps to follow when configuring them. With Microsoft, everything is within a single suite, making it easier to configure and plan. Azure continually upgrades platforms and sends us messages to upgrade to the next version, simplifying the process. Later, it's much easier if I want to upgrade the software platform, scale it, or move it to a different application host as the whole suite comes together. The return on investment is good. If I am doing applications for clients, I can invoice them for better costs. Most applications that I run and use have a better return on investment.

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Archana Heeralal

Security Engineer at Amazon

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.

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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

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"It's very user-friendly."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"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."

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

More Cloudflare pros

"The return on investment is good."

"We have found the most valuable features to be the web application, minimal skills required for management, control through policies, and automation."

"Configuration is much easier than using different platforms."

"The most valuable feature of Azure Web Application Firewall is its ability to filter requests and block false positives by using custom rules and the OWASP rule set."

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

"I can only strongly recommend using the Azure Web Application Firewall."

"It has been a stable product in my experience."

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

More Azure Web Application Firewall pros

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."

"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."

"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."

Cons

"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"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."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

"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."

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

"DNS Management."

More Cloudflare cons

"The knowledge base could be improved."

"The documentation needs to be improved."

"The management can be improved."

"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 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."

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

More Azure Web Application Firewall cons

"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."

"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"We are using the free version."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"The price is reasonable."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."

"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."

"The product has an affordable cost."

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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

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 Signal Sciences?

The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?

The pricing is 50% less than Akamai.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?

Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.

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

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

More Azure Web Application Firewall Competitors

AWS WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 19% of the time

Azure Front Door vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 14% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 12% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 10% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 10% of the time

More The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2025

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) report

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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP

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

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) provides web application and API protection, RASP, rate limiting, bot protection and DDoS purpose built to eliminate the challenges of legacy WAF.

Fastly

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

Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus

Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

April 2025

Free Report: Azure Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

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