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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly comparison

 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare WAF offers quick ROI, crucial protection for e-commerce, saves bandwidth, and balances cost with valuable free features.
Sentiment score
6.0
Fastly boosts return on investment with improved performance, reduced latency, and cuts infrastructure costs by 40-60%.
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.
Owner at Hga consulting
Realizing a 30 to 50% reduction in latency and page load time, ensuring users experience a seamless workflow.
Senior Software Developer at hireHQ
I have seen a return on investment, particularly in time savings, especially regarding the changes.
Arquitecto De Soluciones at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.3
Cloudflare WAF support is mixed; responsive for some, but Indian customers face call availability and administrative issues.
Sentiment score
6.3
Fastly's customer care is efficient with multi-channel support, but has inconsistencies in response times and transparency across time zones.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to contact them.
Owner at Hga consulting
The technical support of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between five and seven at maximum.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
demonstrating the team's technical expertise in CDN and Edge architecture
Senior Software Developer at hireHQ
We have SLAs defined because we opted for enterprise support pricing.
Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would describe Fastly's customer support as fast and efficient when I have had to use it.
Arquitecto De Soluciones at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall offers impressive scalability and automated management, but additional features may incur costs for smaller organizations.
Sentiment score
6.4
Fastly is praised for scalability, ease of growth support, cloud flexibility, excellent support, and successful global integrations.
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.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
Seamlessly handling massive traffic without requiring backend changes due to its globally distributed Edge network and stateless API-driven design.
Senior Software Developer at hireHQ
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is praised for stability, high performance, effective protection, daily use, and minimal downtime.
Sentiment score
7.3
Fastly is stable and reliable with high uptime, no technical issues, and strong performance in enterprise applications.
The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
Highly reliable for enterprise-scale applications with high uptime guarantees.
Senior Software Developer at hireHQ
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare WAF needs feature enhancements, better usability, improved support, advanced DDoS protection, and solutions for latency and alerts.
Fastly requires improvements in China presence, configuration complexity, pricing, customer support, security features, documentation, and bot detection.
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.
CTO at PlayNirvana
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.
Owner at Hga consulting
The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available.
Network Architect at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
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.
Senior Software Developer at hireHQ
Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples.
Arquitecto De Soluciones at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall offers affordable, flexible pricing with no upfront costs, noted for competitiveness and included support services.
Fastly is competitively priced with usage-based costs and customizable options, but some find it expensive with a learning curve.
It operates on a pay-as-you-go structure, but costs scale with traffic, requiring monitoring to avoid unexpected spikes based on data transfers and the number of requests handled.
Senior Software Developer at hireHQ
In terms of price, I find it good.
Arquitecto De Soluciones at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides comprehensive security features, easy setup, scalability, and competitive pricing with praised performance and stability.
Fastly CDNs integrate with Signal Sciences WAF for efficient content delivery, enhancing performance with global edge locations and code management.
The custom rules and the geo-redundant geographical rule feature, which allows me to implement geographical rules for customers, add significant value.
Network Architect at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
All the DNS and everything is routed through Cloudflare, so anybody coming to any of the sites has to go through Cloudflare first, making them the first wall of defense.
Owner at Hga consulting
The best features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall are multiple, including the WAF, rate limiter, and bot attack protection.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
Fastly has a wide number of configuration features that can be performed, and I emphasize that they can be done from code, which makes it much more traceable.
Arquitecto De Soluciones at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Senior Software Developer at hireHQ
In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and WAF, web application firewall, additionally image optimization.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.5%, down from 7.0% 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
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.5%
Fastly1.7%
Other93.8%
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.
Pranay Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at hireHQ
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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
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 Business6
Large Enterprise7
 

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 have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much an...
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 every employee needs to check DNS requests and network traffic. We have strict ne...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?
The pricing of Fastly can be hard to predict because it is primarily usage-based with minimal setup costs and flexible licensing. It operates on a pay-as-you-go structure, but costs scale with traf...
What needs improvement with Fastly?
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, a...
What is your primary use case for Fastly?
Fastly serves as an Edge Cloud platform and CDN that we use for real-time Edge Caching and instant caching purging, allowing us to update data globally within seconds. It sits between our enterpris...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
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 Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.