

Cloudflare and F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager compete in the web security management sector. Cloudflare seems to have the upper hand due to its appeal in pricing and ease of use for smaller organizations, whereas F5 BIG-IP AFM stands out for larger enterprises with its comprehensive network security features.
Features: Cloudflare offers speed improvements with its CDN caching, flexible security options including automatic DDoS protection, and effective DNS management at no extra cost. F5 BIG-IP AFM provides advanced network protection, customizable iRules, and excels in handling application-level threats.
Room for Improvement: Cloudflare could enhance analytics, improve error handling, and expand documentation. F5 BIG-IP AFM could work on simplifying firewall configuration, updating geolocation data, and reducing pricing for better efficiency.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare is praised for its simple deployment experience, especially suitable for small and medium-sized businesses, but its technical support varies in consistency. F5 BIG-IP AFM, though more complex to deploy, is backed by robust customer support and detailed documentation.
Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare's tiered pricing starts at zero for basic plans, making it accessible for small businesses, while higher tiers can be expensive but with satisfactory ROI. F5 BIG-IP AFM is more costly but offers a rich feature set fitting for larger enterprises, providing strong ROI through its comprehensive security solutions.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
We use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds.
The responses are generally fast and effective.
The customer service is excellent, and I rate it ten out of ten.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
The solution is highly scalable, allowing me to add or remove nodes and manage traffic without interruption, which is essential for meeting application demands.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements.
Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements.
Having advanced technology similar to other vendors like Palo Alto for zero-day attack prevention would be valuable.
The appliance and features could be enhanced further, especially in terms of security.
I find it to be cheap.
I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive.
The standard license is reasonably priced, but additional features like the WAF can be more expensive.
If considering a one-stop solution that provides load balancing, DNS security, AAA authentication, and firewalling on the same hardware, the cost is reasonable.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
The solution provides behavioral analysis via AI to detect malicious traffic.
The most valuable features for me are stability, availability, and security, along with the ability to manage multiple features to secure my applications.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 16.7% |
| F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) | 1.2% |
| Other | 82.1% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 46 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 26 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 14 |
Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.
Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.
What are Cloudflare's key features?Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network. Built on F5’s industry-leading BIG-IP hardware and software platforms, BIG-IP AFM provides a scalable platform that delivers the flexible performance and control needed to mitigate aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and protocol attacks before they overwhelm and degrade applications and infrastructure availability.
For service providers, BIG-IP AFM IPS does even more, protecting the network edge and performing traffic inspection and protocol adherence for prevalent service provider protocols such as SS7, Diameter, HTTP/2, GTP, SCTP and SIP traffic coming into the network over UDP, TCP, and SCTP.
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