

Cloudflare and F5 Silverline Managed Services compete in the web security and performance optimization category. Cloudflare seems to have the upper hand due to its wide range of features available even in the free plan and its widespread use in various environments.
Features: Cloudflare offers comprehensive CDN caching, DDoS protection, a web application firewall, and DNS management, all accessible in the free plan. Its layered security and global network optimize performance while reducing server load. F5 Silverline provides robust security with real-time attack mitigation and centralized certificate management, emphasizing comprehensive security controls.
Room for Improvement: Cloudflare could improve analytics, threat insights, and CDN speeds, and enhance its support system's responsiveness. F5 Silverline should expand its PoPs, reduce costs, and improve navigation, with additional automation features being desirable.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare is known for its user-friendly setup in public and hybrid cloud environments, though its support varies by plan level. F5 Silverline's deployment caters to public and on-premises environments, offering dependable technical support appreciated for its expertise.
Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare provides competitive pricing starting from a free plan, enabling growth for smaller businesses. While its enterprise pricing lacks transparency, it presents a solid ROI. F5 Silverline is noted for being expensive, especially for enterprise plans, but ensures quality mitigation and strong ROI potential with higher investment requirements.
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.
Their support team is responsive, and they deliver timely updates, addressing any glitches promptly.
They resolve the issues by joining me to fix them.
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.
F5 Silverline Managed Services is scalable enough without observed limitations.
The solution is fully scalable, and I would give it a rating of ten on a scale of one to ten for scalability.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
They offer regular updates, and overall, I would rate the stability of the solution as nine out of ten.
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.
Introducing preemptive support prompts would reduce the manual effort required for creating policies or blocking specific IPs.
Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles.
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.
On a scale where ten is very expensive, I would rate the pricing as three.
The solution is expensive
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.
It allows for centralized management of certificates, protecting applications from top ten attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
The monitoring tab displays GET and POST requests in a readable format, making it accessible even to non-tech-savvy individuals.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 16.7% |
| F5 Silverline Managed Services | 1.6% |
| Other | 81.7% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 46 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 26 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 6 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
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's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.
Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.
We monitor all Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.