Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

Check Point WAF (formerly 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 April 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) is 2.4%, up from 1.3% 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	4.7%
Check Point CloudGuard WAF	2.4%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.8%
Other	91.1%

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

"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."

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

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

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

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

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

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

"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"On the endpoint side, the most valuable feature is undoubtedly the cloud-based management capability, along with the ransomware protection, despite not encountering any instances so far."

"It helps us streamline our revenue streams, and we're spending less money on application security."

"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."

"It helps me sleep at night, providing peace of mind."

"Check Point CloudGuard WAF has really reduced the headache of IT engineers and has helped me in security through machine learning."

"Machine learning is a valuable tool for this assessment because it allows for a two-phase approach: secure and non-secure."

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

"Whenever there was a new CVE, Check Point CloudGuard WAF used to block them."

More Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) pros

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

Cons

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"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 platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

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

"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."

"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The documentation of each of the tools that they offer needs to be better."

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

"For now, the product is doing all that I need, however, I need the support of IPv6."

"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."

"They need improved latency in the main window."

"Check Point CloudGuard WAF's support is only available in English."

"I would like it to be able to analyze more complex functions, although I did not examine the case study of more complex implementations. Things like forum fields, etc seem to need a little more focused protection of the fields scheme validation."

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

More Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) cons

"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."

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

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

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not too pricey."

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

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

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

"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."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly and competitive."

"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."

"I find the pricing to be reasonable."

"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."

"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."

"The pricing is competitive compared to other solutions on the market. So, the licensing cost is average."

"Check Point CloudGuard Application Security's pricing is not friendly."

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

More Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

26%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Insurance 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	35
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 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?

While Check Point CloudGuard WAF is a strong solution, it could be improved in a few areas such as simplifying and cu...

What is your primary use case for CloudGuard for Application Security?

Check Point CloudGuard WAF's primary use is protecting web applications and APIs from application layer attacks in th...

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?

There are some gaps between the implementation, expectation, and the reality. The main point is user integration with...

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

F5 Distributed Cloud Services works as a Software as a Service based security, networking, and application management...

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

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AWS WAF vs Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF)

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F5 Advanced WAF vs Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF)

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Product Reports

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF)

Download Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) product report

Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) report

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

CDN

March 2026

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 WAF uses AI-driven threat prevention with seamless API integration, offering advanced DDoS protection. It auto-learns attack patterns, updates protection, and minimizes false positives. Its interface simplifies policy management for secure web applications across cloud environments.

Check Point WAF combines AI-driven threat detection with streamlined policy management to provide effective security for web applications and APIs. It offers zero-day protection, threat intelligence, and advanced DDoS protection. Users enjoy robust logging and compliance management across multi-cloud environments. Integration is smooth, with reduced reliance on signatures, facilitating multi-layer security. Despite its strengths, users note areas for improvement, such as latency and pricing, and call for enhancements in API security, real-time monitoring, and reporting. Challenges include integration complexity and limited technical support accessibility. Effective application security across dynamic environments is a key offering.

What are Check Point WAF's key features?

AI-Driven Threat Prevention: Utilizes AI to identify and block threats, minimizing false positives.
Seamless API Integration: Ensures integration into existing infrastructures without delays.
Advanced DDoS Protection: Safeguards against large-scale attacks to maintain service availability.
Auto-Learning Capability: Continuously adapts to new threat patterns for improved security.
User-Friendly Management: Simplifies policy and compliance management tasks.

What benefits can users expect from Check Point WAF?

Extensive Logging: Enables comprehensive analysis and auditing through detailed records.
Reduced Total Cost of Ownership: Provides cost-effective security measures in cloud environments.
Zero-Day Protection: Offers proactive defense against unidentified vulnerabilities.
Streamlined Deployment: Reduces deployment times with easy integration processes.
Robust Multi-Layer Security: Reinforces application security without heavy reliance on signatures.

Check Point WAF finds particular relevance in industries requiring robust cybersecurity measures such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. These sectors benefit from its advanced threat detection and adaptive security policy management, crucial for securing sensitive data across multi-cloud infrastructures. By managing API usage efficiently, it helps maintain regulatory compliance while ensuring optimal operation. Enhanced traffic logging and malware threat management add to its appeal for organizations focusing on securing transactions and sensitive information.

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 WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services