Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

Barracuda Networks and Microsoft are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #33 with an average rating of 6.0, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.3. Additionally, 75% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 78% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service compete in providing web application firewall solutions. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has an upper hand in cost-effectiveness and integration, while Barracuda excels in security and features despite a higher cost.

Features: Microsoft Azure Application Gateway offers robust load balancing, SSL termination, and seamless integration with Azure services for scalability. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service provides comprehensive security features, automated threat updates, and detailed reporting tools, offering a proactive security management approach.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure Application Gateway could improve by enhancing advanced threat protection, more customizable reporting, and better multi-cloud support. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service needs improvement in cost-effectiveness, streamlined integration with non-native cloud services, and more intuitive user management interfaces.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is straightforward for existing Azure users due to its integration and excellent documentation, facilitating a smooth setup process. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service provides a cloud-native deployment model with quick installation and responsive customer support for diverse infrastructures.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is seen as cost-effective, especially for Azure-dependent businesses, with scalable pricing based on usage. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, while having higher initial costs, justifies the expense with substantial ROI due to its advanced security features and long-term application protection benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

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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Hadar Eshel

Co-Founder and CEO at Cloudway

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.…

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Shehzad Ali

Information Security and Compliance Officer at Carnation

Offers time and cost savings with integration, but user interface needs improvement

We are using it for our internal application development. We are testing those features of application gateways. We are integrating it with our solutions, application, Azure Application Gateway Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well. It provides a range of services, so it…

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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

"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."

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"The tool is user-friendly."

"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."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

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

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"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."

More Cloudflare pros

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

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

"It provides an ease of policy management."

"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."

"Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the performance side of things, which is why we use it."

"Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well."

"We can control what rules should be used and what should be disabled."

"We find it valuable because it is compatible with our existing Azure solution."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is its ease of use."

"In my experience, Microsoft products have a smooth integration and facilitate easy management and monitoring. Using Azure Application Gateway allows us to efficiently handle the system loads."

"I find Application Gateway’s WAF module valuable because it helps prevent layer 7 attacks."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway gives us a lot of benefits, including domain mapping."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pros

Cons

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

"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."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

"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."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway's first deployment is complex. It needs to improve its pricing."

"The tool's pricing could be improved."

"The solution is easy to use overall, but the dashboard could be updated with a better layout and graphical design so that we can see the data a bit easier. Microsoft could also add more documentation. The documentation Microsoft provides doesn't tell us about resource requirements. We found that the instances we had weren't sufficient to support the firewall, so we had to increase them."

"The solution has many limitations. You cannot upgrade the VPN to the application gateway. So I started with version one, which has limited capabilities, and they provided version two. And unfortunately, I cannot upgrade from v one to v two like other services. So I have to decommission the version one and create a new one with version two. Also the version one was complex with the certificates uploading the SQL certificates."

"One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS."

"The increased security that we are considering is because of some of the things that the security team has brought to our attention. They have pointed out that we would most likely require a better web application firewall than Azure Application Gateway."

"The pricing of the solution is a bit high. The solution should offer different pricing systems."

"We have encountered some issues with automatic redirection and cancellation, leading to 502 and 504 gateway errors. So, I experienced some trouble with containers."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

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

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"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 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."

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

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

More Cloudflare 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."

"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."

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

"The pricing is based on how much you use the solution."

"The solution is fairly priced."

"The tool's pricing model is pay-as-you-go."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has less price than other application gateway solutions."

"The solution is paid monthly. The solution is highly expensive."

"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."

"The solution is reasonably priced compared to other solutions."

"We use the tool's basic subscription. Its licensing costs are monthly."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway 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

17%

Government

14%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

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 Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

It provides an ease of policy management.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...

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

Infoblox DDI vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 79% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 8% of the time

More Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 11% of the time

HAProxy vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 10% of the time

NetScaler vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 9% of the time

AWS WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 8% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2025

Download Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

May 2025

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway report

Download Microsoft Azure Application Gateway product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Barracuda WAF as a Service

Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway

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

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

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

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

Microsoft

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

Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

April 2025

Free Report: Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

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