Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Fastly comparison

Barracuda Networks and Fastly are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.8, while Fastly is ranked #20 with an average rating of 9.0. Barracuda Networks holds a 1.9% mindshare in WAF, compared to Fastly’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Fastly are competing in the web application security space. Barracuda has an edge in pricing and support, making it attractive for budget-conscious users, while Fastly stands out with its advanced features and customer satisfaction, appealing to those seeking robust capabilities.

Features: Barracuda offers comprehensive security layers, easy integration with existing systems, and reliable DDoS attack protection. Fastly distinguishes itself with real-time threat detection, a global content delivery network, and highly customizable configuration.

Room for Improvement: Barracuda could improve by enhancing its real-time threat detection, expanding its global content delivery network capabilities, and offering more customization options. Fastly could focus on simplifying deployment, enhancing ease of use, and offering more competitive pricing for their features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Barracuda emphasizes simplicity with straightforward deployment and responsive customer support. Fastly features a cloud-native architecture for flexible deployment, praised for its customer service, though it might require more technical expertise initially.

Pricing and ROI: Barracuda offers competitive setup costs with a focus on long-term ROI, appealing to those seeking cost-effective solutions. Fastly has premium pricing that reflects its advanced features and scalability, promising substantial ROI for businesses needing comprehensive performance and security.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

April 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 May 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda Web Application Firewall is 1.9%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 1.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	4.7%
Barracuda Web Application Firewall	1.9%
Fastly	1.7%
Other	91.7%

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.

Read full review

Shahzad Abid

Director Information Technology at College of Physicians & Surgeons Pakistan

Has protected our legacy applications effectively but has required constant manual filtering due to false positives

I assess the effectiveness of the machine learning-driven threat detection in Barracuda Web Application Firewall as sometimes behaving abnormally, often showing me false positive attacks, so I have to fix these attacks from time to time. From a stability point of view, I would definitely rate Barracuda Web Application Firewall a seven out of ten. There is definitely some room for improvement; nothing is perfect in the world. I am not satisfied with the technical support from Barracuda. I am somewhat disappointed with the technical support that I have received so far. Whenever I generate a ticket for my problem, it goes to the Indian support team, and they all the time start with the most junior team member, consuming all my precious time. At the end, I have to close that ticket without any satisfactory solution. I have complained that they should shift my support to any other region because I don't need Indian support; they are simply pathetic and not up to mark. To improve Barracuda Web Application Firewall, customers should be given ongoing training opportunities regarding the product and its features. I am not familiar with many features that are available, only using those which are necessary for my applications. I believe Barracuda must provide clearer product information or training sessions to make it more user-friendly, as sometimes its interface can be rigid and lacking in helpful resources or user tutorials about its features. For it to get closer to a ten, I think advanced reporting is missing because, as I mentioned earlier, there are many false positive events being recorded. Often, when I analyze these attacks, they turn out to be genuine customers or users interacting with my product, but Barracuda tags them as attackers. Reducing false positives must be a priority.

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Pranay Jain

Senior software developer at Simplifyvms

Edge caching has transformed response times and delivers faster candidate data globally

Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users. A more user-friendly, UI-based configuration could simplify the experience, alongside better templates for common use cases and dashboard improvements, as the current dashboard feels complex for beginners, and pricing can be hard to predict for smaller companies. I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities. However, VCL complexity and pricing predictability, especially for smaller companies, along with a user-friendly dashboard are areas impacting my score.

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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

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"I have not had any issues with this solution, and I would recommend it to others who are interested in using it."

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"It protects web applications efficiently."

"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."

"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The solution's most valuable feature is that it actually protects our website, and it provides all the required security functions."

"The installation is straightforward."

"We run it with no downtime, because it has good support."

"Parameter Protection is a valuable feature."

"You don't need help from Barracuda to help with the deployment; the deployment is easy."

"Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides optimized performance, a user-friendly environment, helpful dashboards, and is simple to use."

"We run it with no downtime, because it has good support."

"The protection engine, signature-based protection behavior, and analysis features are also great."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall pros

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"Initially, we faced load time issues, but after deploying Fastly and optimizing our queries, we achieved a response time cut to less than 1 millisecond from an initial 3 to 4 seconds."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

More Fastly pros

Cons

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

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."

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

"Support can be challenging at times."

"Its stability could be better."

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

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."

"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"We've had some blocks of the application and some false positives."

"It is not stable nor mature."

"The usability of the interface could be improved."

"I would like to see better controlling of the traffic."

"The reporting aspect of the solution needs improvement. I don't find that it's very good. They could do some work on it to make it much better. It's not that the reporting isn't secure. It's just that I would prefer to store my reports for an extended period of time. Right now, that's not possible and I'd prefer it if that could change. I also would say that the reports themselves are expensive."

"I would like to see better controlling of the traffic."

"The solution could use more reports."

"Sometimes when we put it in action, we have some blogs that appear as false positives."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall cons

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users."

"It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"Support is not that great."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

More Fastly cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"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."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"It is not too pricey."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"The solution is expensive."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"Barracuda costs us $8,000 per year. Barracuda costs $20,000 for a full subscription, when you try to protect multi-site infrastructure, in different geographical zones and for different data centers. If you have only one site, Barracuda will be cheaper."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"The product pricing was competitive for the value it offers regarding security features."

"The price of this solution is okay."

"While I would have to check on the price of the solution, I feel it to be okay and it matches the market price."

"The pricing is less compared to other web applications."

"The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is quite expensive."

"The product is expensive."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"It is an expensive solution."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Marketing Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare 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	26
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	5

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?

I have been working with Barracuda Web Application Firewall for more than almost three and a half years. Its main use...

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

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Barracuda Web Application Firewall are reasonable. They are competitive wh...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Barracuda Web Application Firewall?

The areas where it could be better are in security profiles, where a single service can have only one policy. There i...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Fastly?

I am using Fastly in the Adobe Commerce Cloud project. In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and ...

See all answers

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Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 17% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Uplynk vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

May 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Web Application Firewall

May 2026

Barracuda Web Application Firewall report

Download Barracuda Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

May 2026

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall integrates DDoS protection, load balancing, and firewall capabilities. Its ease of use, configurability, and robust security measures make it a versatile choice for protecting web applications.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive defense against threats with advanced reporting and robust security measures. It includes DNS integration, rate limiting, and extensive rule sets, all within a SaaS model that allows API configurability. Users value its caching, scalability, and pricing, although enhancements are needed in rate-limiting and third-party integration. Improvements in customer support, especially in India, real-time controls, and user documentation are also desired. Users seek a more intuitive dashboard, better log management, and improved alert systems, along with multitenancy capabilities and enhanced reporting.

What are the key features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

DDoS Protection: Shields applications from denial-of-service attacks
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution
DNS Integration: Enhances domain name system security
Rate Limiting: Controls traffic flow and reduces abuse
Extensive Rule Sets: Offers customizable security rules

What benefits and ROI can users find in reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing business needs
Pricing: Offers reasonable pricing structure
Caching: Improves application performance and speed
Configurable Security: Provides customizable defense settings
Efficient Management: Simplifies security and application control

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall finds application in industries like banking and retail by acting as a comprehensive security gateway, managing authentication and authorization while protecting web applications from malicious Layer 7 traffic. It also implements load balancing, CDN, and zero-trust policies, supported by advanced reporting, analytics tools, and threat scoring to meet specific industry needs.

Cloudflare

Barracuda Web Application Firewall combines advanced bot management, DDoS protection, and real-time threat detection for enhanced application security, making it a popular choice for safeguarding web environments.

Organizations rely on Barracuda Web Application Firewall for its robust features, including automatic security updates and comprehensive technical support. It offers a user-friendly interface, though improvements are needed in scalability and false positive reduction. It is widely used to enhance security against DDoS attacks, cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and malicious bots. Suitable for Azure environments, it manages legitimate traffic and ensures OWASP compliance across cloud and data centers.

What are the top features of Barracuda Web Application Firewall?

Advanced Bot Management: Protects against malicious bot activity through intelligent detection.
DDoS Protection: Offers defenses against Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
Automatic Security Updates: Keeps protections current with auto updates.
Real-Time Threat Detection and Reporting: Monitors and reports threats immediately for rapid response.
Content Filtering and URL Encryption: Secures traffic with robust content inspection and URL encryption.
Traffic Management: Ensures efficient traffic handling and stability.

What benefits should be noted in reviews?

Enhanced Security: Strong protection against a wide range of web threats.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies configuration and management tasks.
Comprehensive Support: Access to technical support for rapid issue resolution.
Real-Time Monitoring: Immediate detection and reporting enhance threat management.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall is implemented in industries like cloud and banking for its compliance capabilities and threat protection. It supports web applications through traffic filtering, server protection, and content inspection in hosting environments.

Barracuda Networks

Fastly is a leading provider of content delivery network services that enhances website performance through efficient caching and real-time architecture capabilities.

Fastly integrates CDN technology with advanced web application firewall for comprehensive security. Its global infrastructure supports performance enhancement, rapid deployment, and rollback capabilities. Utilizing the VCL language allows custom caching solutions. Compute@Edge provides extensive architectural flexibility, aiding in HTML manipulation and script execution. Users benefit from its stability and reliability features for seamless network protection, log management, image optimization, and A/B testing. Challenges include limited support in mainland China, inadequate WebSocket protocol implementation, and complex pricing structures.

What are the key features of Fastly?

CDN Integration: Delivers content quickly across global Points of Presence.
Signal Sciences’ WAF: Manages security threats effectively.
VCL Language: Offers customizable caching solutions.
Compute@Edge: Enables flexible architecture for HTML manipulation.
Image Optimization: Enhances performance with dynamic image delivery.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Performance Enhancement: Boosts website speed and response time.
Rapid Deployment: Allows for swift implementation and rollback.
Real-Time Visibility: Provides insights into cached content management.
Security and Stability: Ensures reliability against DDoS attacks and other threats.
Flexibility: Offers diverse network protection and infrastructure capabilities.

Fastly is widely implemented in industries needing robust content delivery and security capabilities. Companies use it as a reverse proxy for media delivery, ensuring availability and optimized performance. Its rapid deployment and rollback features are particularly beneficial in technology sectors requiring agile responses to demand shifts.

Fastly

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

April 2026

Free Report: Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

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