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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Fastly 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 Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Barracuda Web Application F...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
17th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
23rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th)
 

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 Web Application Firewall is 1.9%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 1.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall5.4%
Barracuda Web Application Firewall1.9%
Fastly1.4%
Other91.3%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
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.
Shahzad Abid - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
PP
Technical support engineer at Adobe
Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering
I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"The initial setup process is simple."
"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."
"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the simplicity of configuration."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the signature base."
"What I like most about Barracuda Web Application Firewall is its availability. I also like that it's an easy-to-use solution."
"It's very simple and predictable, because Barracuda provides a vision of the current state of your application. It gives you an understanding of what is happening on your site and any attempts against you at your source. This is the main value that Web Application Firewall provides our company. These aspects are also the main reason for this documentation process."
"It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs in our environment."
"This product gives us visibility into what is going on in two servers, including connections and sessions, real-time alerts, very good reporting, and KPIs. It makes managing security of a critical server very easy, with a friendly GUI."
"One of the strongest points is its robust issue discovery capabilities. Barracuda invests significant efforts in identifying and resolving issues. They have multiple products that work in tandem to perform these checks, which is beneficial because it automates security updates. This is the primary reason I recommend it to my customers."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic content filtering."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"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."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."
 

Cons

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"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."
"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. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"In the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, there should be more affordable options for WAF as a service."
"The incident reporting needs to be improved."
"As a service, Barracuda needs to host in Saudi Arabia, as they currently don't have this functionality."
"There are false positives that I am receiving when compared to other WAFs."
"I have to go to an individual obligation, make changes, and come out, and go to the next obligation and make the same changes. There is no grouping option."
"I would like to see an improved capacity to store logs so that they will be available for a longer time."
"They should improve their features, so they easily compare to the competition."
"Barracuda Web Application Firewall lacks some of the more specified and structured features offered by solutions like Tenable."
"Support is not that great."
"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."
"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"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."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"The solution is expensive."
"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 pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The pricing is less compared to other web applications."
"The product is expensive."
"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."
"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."
"While I would have to check on the price of the solution, I feel it to be okay and it matches the market price."
"They have competitive pricing."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
I am not using the API protection feature right now because I don't host any APIs through Barracuda Web Application F...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
At the time I was acquiring Barracuda Web Application Firewall, I found it costly compared to other products. To over...
What needs improvement with Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
I assess the effectiveness of the machine learning-driven threat detection in Barracuda Web Application Firewall as s...
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 ...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.