Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services

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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 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 Check Point CloudGuard WAF is 2.6%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.8%, up from 0.8% 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	5.4%
Check Point CloudGuard WAF	2.6%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.8%
Other	90.2%

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.

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KrishnakumarM

CISO at Pink Solutions

Cloud security has strengthened risk posture and improved advanced threat visibility

There are some API gateway and API securities I mentioned. If these are incorporated with AI-related features, particularly those seven key vulnerabilities I mentioned—token theft and tool poisoning—that would be beneficial. AI-related features are not included yet in Check Point CloudGuard WAF. However, they are present in FortiGate. That is the advantage of FortiGate now. FortiGate is stopping all AI-related vulnerabilities now. FortiGate has this capability. It is unfortunate that even Palo Alto also lacks one or two of these features. Check Point Quantum is very good, without a doubt. However, their capabilities are not in comparison with Palo Alto. There are some features, but there are some gaps in comparison with Palo Alto.

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Mohan Janarthanan

Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions

Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

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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

"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."

"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."

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

"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."

"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."

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

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"Check Point CloudGuard WAF works well for preemptively blocking Zero Day attacks and detecting hidden anomalies."

"Before CloudGuard, we periodically had some website issues. Since we've had CloudGuard, we've never had these issues happen again."

"The price of Check Point CloudGuard WAF is not expensive, as it was the cheapest solution we found."

"It provides security for our customers and our products."

"It is a highly scalable solution with a quick turnaround time for deployment and running of the software across any IT system."

"It offers high performance and improved productivity for users."

"The best feature of Check Point CloudGuard WAF is advanced threat prevention integrated with Check Point threat cloud intelligence, which provides real-time protection against web application attacks including zero-day threats, automatically receiving updates from the threat cloud and analyzing millions of indicators of compromise daily."

"Check Point CloudGuard WAF delivers clear efficiency gains over traditional WAFs in three main areas: operations, accuracy, and cost optimization."

More Check Point CloudGuard WAF pros

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."

"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."

Cons

"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."

"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."

"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."

"Its stability could be better."

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

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Improving the process for handling licensing renewals would be a welcome enhancement."

"Check Point CloudGuard WAF is a strong solution, but there are a few areas where it could be improved, particularly the user interface for managing custom rules and exceptions, which could be more intuitive and streamlined to reduce the learning curve for new users, especially when deploying for the first time."

"I do not know if it is already there, but I would like to have complete visibility between the posture management and firewall as a service."

"AI-related features are not included yet in Check Point CloudGuard WAF. However, they are present in FortiGate; that is the advantage of FortiGate now."

"Support could be improved, particularly in terms of availability."

"I would like to be able to integrate the theme of Artificial Intelligence to help review issues and to monitor and view the security issue while also suggesting and interpreting and additionally configuring solutions - basically, acting as an interpreter."

"For the next release, I would suggest considering features like enhanced threat intelligence integration."

"The coding configurations can be simplified to save time for IT teams and developers."

More Check Point CloudGuard WAF cons

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."

"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

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

"The solution is expensive."

"It is not too pricey."

"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."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"I find the pricing to be reasonable."

"As Infiniti customers, the pricing is manageable, as we have allowances dedicated to each Check Point product. The price is not as high compared to other options I have dealt with in the past."

"Check Point CloudGuard WAF is expensive compared to Azure WAF."

"Considering all the benefits we've observed, we find the price to be satisfactory."

"The sales team or account managers from Check Point are top-notch. As I am using other products as well, my pricing was competitive compared to others."

"I work for an Indian banking client. In India, companies are on a budget. The company liked Check Point very much, but it was a little bit costly compared to FortiWeb. However, it had more features compared to FortiWeb."

"If the pricing for the Infinity platform covers everything, it would be more straightforward. I had a hard time selling it to our CEO as a former CFO because of the differentials. There are different deltas year to year over a five-year period. It is very difficult to explain. It would be easier to digest for our executives if there was a flatter scale"

"The base solution costs approximately 30,000 euros, with an additional 2,000 euros per year for licenses and support."

More Check Point CloudGuard WAF pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

26%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Government

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	36
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	19

No data available

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.

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 do you like most about CloudGuard for Application Security?

We have not had any incidents. We could realize its benefits immediately. We watched and monitored the traffic, and i...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudGuard for Application Security?

Check Point CloudGuard WAF is expensive. It is a little bit expensive. You cannot avoid this from an Israeli product....

What needs improvement with CloudGuard for Application Security?

There are some API gateway and API securities I mentioned. If these are incorporated with AI-related features, partic...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four...

What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact obser...

What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is being used for web application firewall along with API security, bot protection, and...

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

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Product Reports

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Check Point CloudGuard WAF

Download Check Point CloudGuard WAF product report

CDN

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

Check Point CloudGuard Application Security, CloudGuard Application Security, CloudGuard AppSec

No data available

Overview

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.

Cloudflare

Check Point CloudGuard WAF offers advanced security for web applications and APIs with features such as intrusion prevention, bot prevention, and AI-driven threat detection, ensuring organizations achieve high-level protection and efficient security management.

Check Point CloudGuard WAF integrates with APIs, providing a seamless security enhancement while reducing false positives. Its scalability supports rapid deployment, valuable for companies aiming to secure resources in clouds like AWS and Azure. Enhanced threat prevention, comprehensive compliance support, and advanced threat protection methods such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting prevention are key strengths. Despite its robust capabilities, there are opportunities for improvement, such as lower costs, improved third-party tool integration, and a more intuitive interface to enhance usability.

What are the key features of Check Point CloudGuard WAF?

Intrusion Prevention System: Effectively detects and blocks unauthorized access attempts.
Bot Prevention: Shields applications from malicious bot traffic.
AI-driven Threat Detection: Uses advanced algorithms to identify and mitigate threats.
Log Management: Offers extensive logging capabilities for tracking and analysis.
Scalability: Supports rapid deployment across different environments, including multi-cloud.

What benefits should users expect from Check Point CloudGuard WAF?

Security Efficiency: Combines high-grade protection with ease of use to simplify security management.
Cost Efficiency: Aids in effective resource utilization, minimizing overhead.
Compliance Support: Helps meet various industry standards effortlessly.
Enhanced Threat Protection: Provides robust safeguards against common web vulnerabilities.

Check Point CloudGuard WAF is predominantly applied within industries requiring stringent security standards, such as financial services, healthcare, and e-commerce. Its deployment strengthens the defense of critical APIs, facilitates compliance, and supports efficient multi-cloud security management, aligning well with evolving industry demands.

Check Point Software Technologies

F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Orange España, Paschoalotto

Information Not Available

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services