Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs F5 Advanced WAF comparison

Barracuda Networks and F5 are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #19 with an average rating of 10.0, while F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.4. Barracuda Networks holds a 0.9% mindshare in WAF, compared to F5’s 7.1% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

F5 Advanced WAF and Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service compete in the web application security space. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service offers advantages in flexibility and comprehensive features, despite F5 Advanced WAF's strengths in pricing and support.

Features: F5 Advanced WAF provides threat intelligence, DDoS protection, and robust policies for complex environments. It is known for its stability and capability to support large-scale deployments. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service offers a cloud-native architecture, rapid scalability, and seamless integration with third-party services, ideal for modern infrastructures.

Room for Improvement: F5 Advanced WAF could reduce its complexity in deployment and enhance real-time integration capabilities. Improvements in cloud feature integration could be beneficial. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service could benefit from cost reduction and enhanced customization options to better cater to specific enterprise needs. Streamlining advanced feature settings could enhance user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 Advanced WAF involves a complex deployment process, which is suitable for customizable setups but can be time-consuming, complemented by strong customer service. In contrast, Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service emphasizes streamlined cloud deployment, requiring minimal setup time and offering agile deployment, supported by responsive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: F5 Advanced WAF offers competitive pricing, providing strong ROI, especially for enterprises needing customizable solutions. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service requires a higher initial investment but offers long-term ROI through reduced operational and maintenance costs, appealing to businesses focusing on total cost of ownership.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. F5 Advanced WAF Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. F5 Advanced WAF

March 2026

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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 Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 7.1%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF	7.1%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.4%
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service	0.9%
Other	86.6%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

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.

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Tarandeep Kaur

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.

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Kallamuddin Ansari

Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize

Application security has protected critical banking services while policy learning minimizes false blocks

F5 Advanced WAF performs well overall, but I have noticed some points that could enhance the solution. Initially, policy tuning could be simpler, as while the learning engine is powerful, initial tuning still requires experienced engineers, which can be challenging for new teams due to the complexity of options and parameters. A more guided and simple tuning workflow would help reduce the learning curve. Additionally, tighter native integration with SIEM or SOAR tools would simplify correlation and investigations for security teams, although log exports are available. Overall, these are not blockers, merely enhancement opportunities, and once tuned, F5 Advanced WAF is very stable and reliable; improving usability, reporting, and onboarding would make it even more effective for larger environments.

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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

"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

"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."

"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."

"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."

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

"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."

"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"

"Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service has positively impacted our organization by reducing cyber threats like ransomware and phishing by ninety-five percent."

"I like its ability to identify known attacks, including DDOS attacks. It's valuable because software must be able to stop known attacks. Application attacks are evolving all the time. When it comes to software-as-a-service, we need to have software that knows about all the latest attacks. It should also protect against major unknown attacks."

"It provides an ease of policy management."

"Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service's real-time attack detection feature has improved our customers' threat response strategies significantly."

"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."

"This solution inspects your traffic and based on that, automatically create distinct qualities for you, so you can add this to the policy already created. That's what I like most."

"Identification, ease of use, and ease of modifying it to most of our needs are valuable."

"It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the rules per the requirements."

"We can monitor IP locations, but we have constraints from each country. It has a replication feature. Licenses can be shared, taking turns with each license."

"F5 Advanced WAF is a comprehensive community platform with a strong commitment, making it valuable for businesses."

"This solution is an enterprise-class firewall that provides both load-balancing and security."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the overall capabilities, there is not a comparable solution on the market."

"The solution isn't too expensive. The license allows you to license what you need and leave out what you don't need."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

Cons

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."

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

"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"Its stability could be better."

"The reporting could be more granular."

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

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The stability of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"It's a very specific solution that is only requested for a customer's web code or their global IT policy."

"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."

"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."

"One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy."

"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."

"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."

"There should be more ability to rate limit certain scenarios. The majority of the time, it is either on or off. For certain types of use cases, there should be the ability to rate limit, not just enable or disable."

"We usually use a third-party tool for logging and reporting. It would be nice if we could do that right on this solution. They have one, but it's not very stable. Logging and reporting effectively would be a big enhancement."

"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."

"The product could be more user-friendly for administrators."

"Users would like to have an additional IP intelligence license to handle this within WAF itself without needing to engage with the SOC team."

"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."

"I would like to see the API Protection improved."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"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."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The product is expensive but it offers flexible pricing. It could be affordable."

"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."

"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"

"The price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve it is expensive."

"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."

"It is expensive. Its price should be better. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. Its licensing is also based on the model. There are no additional costs."

"F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."

"I am not sure about pricing but licenses are available on Google."

"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."

"It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Government

13%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	2

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	31

Questions from the Community

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

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

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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...

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What needs improvement with Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

I see that cost can be a limitation for small businesses. Additionally, if they can provide more advanced features an...

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What is your primary use case for Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

We primarily use Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service for raising security incidents by proactively blocking malware, ransomwar...

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What advice do you have for others considering Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

I rate Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service a five out of five overall. The reason I choose five out of five is that all the th...

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What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?

It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the r...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is a bit higher, but not that high. I would say for a good amount of revenue-generati...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

On the features I wish existed, Big-IP Advanced WAF is primarily an on-premises solution and in that solution, there ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 8% of the time

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Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

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Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

Cloudbric WAF+ vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 13% of the time

AWS WAF vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 10% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 8% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 23% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 6% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

NetScaler vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 3% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

March 2026

Download Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

March 2026

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

Barracuda WAF as a Service

No data available

Overview

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

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is a comprehensive solution designed to provide application security, DDoS protection, SSL authentication, protocol support, and application delivery. It is a plug-and-play solution with automated policies, simple configuration, and easy rule creation.

The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system based on email protection with cloud security. It is also a web application firewall and covers major protection and threat management functions. With Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, customers can ensure the security of their web code and comply with global IT policies.

Barracuda Networks

F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.

F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Salvation Army

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. F5 Advanced WAF

March 2026

Free Report: Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. F5 Advanced WAF

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