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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...
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
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 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%
Fastly1.4%
Other93.2%
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.
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

"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"The initial setup process is simple."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."
"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."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"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."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
 

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."
"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."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"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."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"Support is not that great."
"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"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."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"It is not too pricey."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"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."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
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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%
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 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 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 needs improvement with Fastly?
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 ad...
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 WAF, web application firewall, additionally image optimization.
 

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: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.