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Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs Fortinet FortiWeb 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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (34th)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Hadar Eshel - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to install platform with valuable policy management features
We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy. Additionally, it could operate in a local data center.…
OcheEluma - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced security with comprehensive traffic inspection and some downtime automation needs
One area that needs improvement is the handling of SaaS downtime. When there is downtime at their data center, it becomes a transit point issue for us, causing downtime in our environment as well. Although measures like built-in redundancy and manual switching between data centers exist, there is room for improvement in making these transitions automatic without impacting the customer. Automating the migration without manual intervention would significantly enhance user experience during downtime. Additionally, being able to read non-flagged traffic for operational purposes could also be an area to improve.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"It provides an ease of policy management."
"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"
"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."
"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."
"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."
"The product's initial setup phase was straightforward, and since our company didn't have any problems with it, we didn't encounter many problems with the tool."
"What we like about Fortinet FortiWeb is it has all the features. We use all of them, so we have to turn on all the options."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its security profile."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"It is a good product. We have just blocked everything coming from some geographical locations or certain countries, and it has been working very efficiently when I look at logs, events, and incidents generated from the system. It is generating very good analytic reports about it. This is the most valuable thing about this solution. It has load balancing and almost everything that a web application firewall needs. It is very flexible and easy to learn and configure. It can be easily learned and configured by using the information available on different channels such as YouTube."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Fail-Open."
"Deployment can be straightforward"
"The most valuable feature is ease of use."
 

Cons

"Technical support is lacking."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"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."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"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."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"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."
"The stability of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy."
"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."
"It's a very specific solution that is only requested for a customer's web code or their global IT policy."
"It is not entirely user-friendly."
"The initial setup in our data center was somewhat complex."
"The support side of things can be improved."
"A better load balancer is needed when multiple servers are used for the same website."
"Its threat intelligence capabilities may not be as advanced as some competitors."
"Lacks a VM demo to enable testing prior to purchase."
"They could improve their support a little bit for faster response time."
"Centralized configuration using FortiManager – like what exists for NGFW FortiGate appliances - would improve the configuration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"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."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The product is expensive but it offers flexible pricing. It could be affordable."
"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."
"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."
"Its subscription prices are cheaper, and it is not very expensive. From a price perspective, Fortinet is a very well-known security vendor. Subscriptions are very simple. They have a couple of licenses on an appliance, and that's it. The cost is not that big. One license is 40K, which they give with all the products. Another one includes the subscriptions for threat prevention, IPS, sandboxing, etc, which is more than enough."
"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a ten out of ten."
"The solution is cheaper compared with other solutions. It has a yearly license."
"All our Fortinet pricing is bundled together for different products, like FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiWeb. FortiWeb, by itself, is probably around $2,500 to $3,500."
"The price is competitive."
"The pricing is pretty good. We do pass a lot of traffic through our API servers. Something like 100 gigs of web traffic is a fair amount for reduced JSON API calls, but the cost is $50. For that peace of mind, we have thousands and thousands of customers that are protected by that $50, so it's a no-brainer."
"The pricing is average; the product is neither particularly expensive nor affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Media Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise30
 

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 needs improvement with Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strateg...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals.
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?
The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?
The pricing for Fortinet FortiWeb varies with different models having different prices. It depends on the requirement...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
There is room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb. The team was only from FortiGate itself. They are making new firm...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Barracuda WAF as a Service
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Salvation Army
Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. Fortinet FortiWeb and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.