


Barracuda Web Application Firewall and F5 Advanced WAF are competing solutions in web application security. Barracuda stands out with cost-effective pricing and support, whereas F5 Advanced WAF is noted for its extensive features, making it ideal for environments needing comprehensive protection.
Features: Barracuda Web Application Firewall includes automated threat intelligence, granular access control, and built-in DDoS protection, suitable for various setups. F5 Advanced WAF offers machine learning, extensive integration, and detailed analytics, providing robust defense capabilities.
Room for Improvement:Barracuda could enhance its feature set for more advanced protection tools and improve the automation of security updates. Additional machine learning capabilities and deeper analytics could increase its competitive edge. F5 Advanced WAF, while feature-rich, would benefit from a simplified deployment process and improved usability for non-experts. Enhancing the integration support across more platforms could further expand its applicability.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Barracuda is known for its easy deployment and accessible support, making it quick to integrate. F5 Advanced WAF may require a more complex setup due to its advanced capabilities but offers specialized support for handling complex environments.
Pricing and ROI: Barracuda offers a cost-effective solution providing solid ROI with its reasonable pricing. F5 Advanced WAF generally requires a higher investment, justified by its advanced features and high ROI in settings needing comprehensive security.
My experience with the pricing or licensing of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is that many features can be accessed for free, so the pricing is definitely reasonable.
My development team is working on the latest language tools or applications, so until then, this web application firewall is essential in my network to protect my existing online assets or software.
We have seen a return on investment as the manual work for monitoring attacks and generating reports is reduced significantly, saving money.
Time savings in daily operations come from the automatic learning and signature update reducing the need for constant manual rule management, allowing the security and network teams to spend significantly less time handling false positive application-related escalations.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to contact them.
The technical support of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between five and seven at maximum.
I would rate customer support a solid ten, as they are consistently on top of every issue, addressing them without delays and providing excellent support twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
The customer service and support from Barracuda have been excellent.
The customer service and support are exceptional, and I would give them a ten out of ten.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
I have interacted with F5's support, and while I have no major complaints, they could improve.
The scalability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between 8 to 9, as it depends upon the use cases and what exactly the client needs.
The VMSS feature allows for easy upgrades or scaling of virtual editions.
I believe Barracuda Web Application Firewall is quite scalable, and I would rate it as an eight.
I can run it in HA mode or even divide the traffic volume to the number of instances that I have based on their resource sizing.
The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10.
These result in clients complaining about blocked transactions on a daily basis.
Barracuda Web Application Firewall is stable in my experience.
F5 Advanced WAF has been very reliable and consistent for us; in our on-premise enterprise setup, it has been stable and predictable in day-to-day operations without any unexpected crashes or WAF-related downtime in production.
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available.
I think they're doing a good job with DNS and as support for any domains that I create or that my clients create, it's mandatory for me to ensure they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider.
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.
Reducing false positives must be a priority.
The issues with false positives affect client transactions, leading to complaints about blocked transactions.
Tenable provides more comprehensive dark web scanning capabilities, which Barracuda could improve upon.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
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.
There is excellent clarity in the LTM and the WAF.
I requested a quote from Barracuda's UK team, which was half the price I was quoted in Pakistan.
The pricing for Barracuda is quite high compared to other OEMs.
They are competitive when compared to other vendors including F5 and Imperva, who tend to have higher prices.
Licensing is capacity-driven, so you need careful planning based on traffic volume and use cases, and adding features such as Bot Protection impacts costs; once licensing is clear and sized correctly, there are no surprises.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
The custom rules and the geo-redundant geographical rule feature, which allows me to implement geographical rules for customers, add significant value.
The best features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall are multiple, including the WAF, rate limiter, and bot attack protection.
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools add a layer that we're able to visualize and see before it actually hits the local firewall.
The most valuable features of Barracuda Web Application Firewall include advanced bot protection, DDoS protection, and addressing the top ten vulnerabilities.
This process protects against attacks including SQL injection or cross-site scripting, where Barracuda Web Application Firewall will block any request that matches attack signatures.
The most valuable feature of Barracuda Web Application Firewall is managing bot traffic.
The Advanced Attack Signature database is very strong and regularly updated, effectively blocking SQL injections, cross-site scripting, command injections, and file inclusion attacks while allowing selective enabling or disabling of signatures to avoid blocking genuine traffic.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
It contains the logic of both negative and positive security combined.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 Advanced WAF | 7.1% |
| Cloudflare Web Application Firewall | 5.4% |
| Barracuda Web Application Firewall | 1.9% |
| Other | 85.6% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 16 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 6 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 26 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 26 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
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.
Barracuda Web Application Firewall is a game-changing cloud-connected security solution that enables organizations to safeguard both their applications and their data from an ever-growing array of advanced cyber threats. It offers protection from cyber attacks that target not only data and applications stored on the cloud but also those that are housed on web servers. 43% of the time a breach takes place via a compromised application. Barracuda Web Application Firewall prevents these types of breaches from occurring.
Barracuda Web Application Firewall denies hackers the ability to penetrate your system by using a number of techniques to keep your organization safely insulated. The first method of protection consists of two parts. The first part involves a thorough scanning of all inbound web traffic. This solution monitors everything that comes into the system. It employs IP reputation intelligence, which filters all incoming data. If the source of the data has a bad reputation, it is blocked by the firewall. Administrators now have a way of locking out many common threats that could otherwise compromise sensitive networks. These scans can also allow administrators to protect their systems from within as DLP (Data Loss Prevention) protocols. If any sensitive data attempts to leave, administrators will automatically be alerted and the data will be blocked from exiting.
Barracuda Web Application Firewall can also be set up to apply the AAA (Authentication, Authorization & Accounting) framework to an organization’s network. If an intruder manages to get past the authentication stage, the authorization protocols kick in. After the authorization stage comes accounting, which works by tracking and logging users’ activities so that administrators will be in a position to prevent long-term damage from being done. This three-step process can be implemented without requiring administrators to make changes to their applications.
Key Features
Some of Barracuda Web Application Firewall’s key features include:
Reviews from Real Users
Barracuda Web Application Firewall stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. One of the main ones is the robustness of the solution. Users are given access to a vast variety of security features in a single product.
PeerSpot user Muhammed S., a Presales Solutions Architect at Hilal Computers, notes this when he writes, "The solution offers multiple security features. There are machine learning features and great URL encryption. It also offers multi-protocol support against DDoS attacks."
Other reviewers note that Barracuda Web Application Firewall is user-friendly, easy to set up, stable, and reliable.
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.
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