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F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

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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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.6
F5 Advanced WAF offers ROI by saving time, reducing costs, enhancing security, and ensuring compliance for businesses.
Sentiment score
4.8
F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers cost savings, time efficiency, reduced overhead, and fast ROI with enhanced security benefits.
Time savings in daily operations come from the automatic learning and signature update reducing the need for constant manual rule management, allowing the security and network teams to spend significantly less time handling false positive application-related escalations.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
I would estimate the cost was reduced by approximately 30 percent in the first year.
Information Security at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is definitely a return on investment in F5 Distributed Cloud Services.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
I do find F5 Distributed Cloud Services to be cost-effective, as it brings benefits and a strong return on investment.
Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at BMB
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
F5 Advanced WAF's customer service is highly professional and knowledgeable, but response speed and availability need improvement for some users.
Sentiment score
6.3
F5 users praise expertise and reliability but seek improved response times, especially for urgent issues and faster human interaction.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
Security Analyst at IBM
While they resolve issues well, the time taken for responses to non-critical issues should be shorter.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
CEO at CyberApp
There is a lot of support from F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the knowledge on the page is very good and reliable.
Engineer Solutions Architect at SCitum
I would provide 9.5 for support.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Email services are good, but they need to have a good human-based interaction with the call centers.
Senior Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
F5 Advanced WAF is scalable, efficiently handling large traffic, praised for flexibility, and easily upgraded to meet user needs.
Sentiment score
6.6
F5 Distributed Cloud Services are highly scalable, efficiently managing complex traffic and handling DDoS attacks with minimal configuration challenges.
If you need to scale up, such as moving from a lower model to a higher one, the configuration from the lower model can be migrated easily without issues.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I can run it in HA mode or even divide the traffic volume to the number of instances that I have based on their resource sizing.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
I need the traffic management environments in distributed management, which have a very good goal to manage very difficult traffic in the world.
Engineer Solutions Architect at SCitum
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
F5 Advanced WAF is highly reliable and stable, rarely facing downtime, with user ratings of 8-10 for performance.
Sentiment score
8.3
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is praised for its high stability, minimal downtime, and effective load balancing, despite occasional configuration issues.
F5 Advanced WAF has been very reliable and consistent for us; in our on-premise enterprise setup, it has been stable and predictable in day-to-day operations without any unexpected crashes or WAF-related downtime in production.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
F5 Advanced WAF is stable, and there is no doubt it is one of the best WAFs in the market.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
I won't face any issues with stability as a concern because it provides the load balancers and all redundancy, so it's very unlikely that we have any downtime.
Senior Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
 

Room For Improvement

F5 Advanced WAF needs improvements in pricing, usability, API protection, bot detection, deployment, and advanced integration features.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services enhances UI/UX but needs better analytics, API security, pricing, onboarding, and system integration.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Overall, these are not blockers, merely enhancement opportunities, and once tuned, F5 Advanced WAF is very stable and reliable; improving usability, reporting, and onboarding would make it even more effective for larger environments.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF.
IT Analyst at Atlas.cz, a.s.
For availability, they have added additional clusters across all the regional edges in the Kubernetes clusters to enhance availability.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
F5 Distributed Cloud Services doesn't have something like that. That is the reason why CloudFlare remains a leader in that space for small customers and those who have just started or are startups.
Senior Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers find F5 Advanced WAF's pricing high but justified in banking, with complex licensing and higher setup costs.
Licensing is capacity-driven, so you need careful planning based on traffic volume and use cases, and adding features such as Bot Protection impacts costs; once licensing is clear and sized correctly, there are no surprises.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
CEO at CyberApp
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable.
Engineer Solutions Architect at SCitum
I believe the prices are much higher than I expected, but for the time being, the customer is still paying.
Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at BMB
 

Valuable Features

F5 Advanced WAF offers robust application security with bot protection, DDoS mitigation, and customizable threat detection for improved efficiency.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a unified platform with advanced security, optimized performance, and efficient multi-cloud operations.
The Advanced Attack Signature database is very strong and regularly updated, effectively blocking SQL injections, cross-site scripting, command injections, and file inclusion attacks while allowing selective enabling or disabling of signatures to avoid blocking genuine traffic.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It contains the logic of both negative and positive security combined.
CEO at CyberApp
The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation.
IT Analyst at Atlas.cz, a.s.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well.
Senior Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
 

Categories and Ranking

F5 Advanced WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), API Security (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 3.6%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.9%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF3.6%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services1.9%
Other94.5%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2797602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Granular security policies have protected critical applications and ensure safe user and admin access
Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a request gets blocked on the TCP layer, there should be traces or data to verify which source generated these requests, including the source and port information for initiation. These data are missing from F5 Advanced WAF. Besides that, another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients. Overall, I find everything else good. A wish list feature I have is for the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to respond more promptly. Their response time needs improvement; while they do not take excessive time, it can be enhanced, especially given it is a security product.
Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management
F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
F5 Advanced WAF is somewhat costly compared to other vendors, but it is worth the investment due to the stability it provides to the environment and infrastructure.
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a request gets blocked on the TCP layer, there should be traces or data to verify wh...
What is your primary use case for F5 Advanced WAF?
My main use case for F5 Advanced WAF is to protect external and internal applications from cyber attacks and to prevent malicious payloads and malicious data from reaching servers. Even if maliciou...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced.Specifically, the confidence level on API security that F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
My main use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services is WAF protection.I am using F5 Distributed Cloud Services primarily for securing my infrastructure with layer 7 protection, which F5 provides. Th...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.