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Cloudflare vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (28th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Cloudflare is designed for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection and holds a mindshare of 19.6%, up 19.1% compared to last year.
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences), on the other hand, focuses on Web Application Firewall (WAF), holds 1.0% mindshare, up 0.7% since last year.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Archana Heeralal - PeerSpot reviewer
A good solution to implement web application firewall for applications
There are some lags in Signal Sciences for the web application firewalls. Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic. There is a little bit of complexity with custom rules that should be removed. Signal Sciences should add a feature called rate limiting with multiple options, wherein I can create a rate limiting based on the cookie request or the IP.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
 

Cons

"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"The pricing could be improved."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"We are using the free version."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The product has an affordable cost."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: June 2025.
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