F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly comparison

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F5 Advanced WAF

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and F5 Advanced WAF are competitors in the web application security market. Fastly has an edge with its superior performance scalability and intuitive integrations, while F5 Advanced WAF leads in offering comprehensive security features.

Features: Fastly offers real-time insights, robust CDN capabilities, and seamless platform integration. F5 Advanced WAF provides extensive security features like enhanced bot protection, DDoS mitigation, and advanced threat detection.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could enhance its zero-trust security solutions and introduce more robust security features. F5 Advanced WAF could improve its deployment speed, ease of use, and expand its configuration options to reduce complexity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly provides an efficient deployment process and offers responsive customer support, making it easy for organizations to start quickly. F5 Advanced WAF, though rich in security features, requires a more complex deployment process that can demand more resources and technical expertise.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly offers a competitive pricing model, emphasizing CDN and scalability, delivering good initial setup value and ROI for performance-focused businesses. F5 Advanced WAF entails a higher initial investment due to its extensive features but provides long-term ROI for companies seeking deep security insights and comprehensive threat management.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly Report (Updated: December 2025).

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly

December 2025

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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

F5 Advanced WAF

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Fastly

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

18th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

CDN (8th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 7.8%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 1.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
F5 Advanced WAF	7.8%
Fastly	1.3%
Other	90.9%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Kallamuddin Ansari

Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize

Application security has protected critical banking services while policy learning minimizes false blocks

F5 Advanced WAF performs well overall, but I have noticed some points that could enhance the solution. Initially, policy tuning could be simpler, as while the learning engine is powerful, initial tuning still requires experienced engineers, which can be challenging for new teams due to the complexity of options and parameters. A more guided and simple tuning workflow would help reduce the learning curve. Additionally, tighter native integration with SIEM or SOAR tools would simplify correlation and investigations for security teams, although log exports are available. 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.

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Patel Parth

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution is an enterprise-class firewall that provides both load-balancing and security."

"The most valuable feature is that it is secure."

"F5 Advanced WAF is a comprehensive community platform with a strong commitment, making it valuable for businesses."

"Good dashboard and reporting."

"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are SSL uploading, signature, and anomaly detection. It is overall a high-quality solution."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its extensive set of capabilities for application protection, including DDoS prevention, and its ability to work with Pentesters and external scanners to observe user activity and eliminate false positives."

"Overall, I believe it has been a good decision to switch because I do not think any other product available on the market can compete with F5 at this time."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"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."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

More Fastly pros

Cons

"The overall price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve."

"It's a powerful tool yet can be complex for new users."

"The solution could improve by having an independent capture module. It has a built feature that you can deploy the capture on your published website. However, it's not very user-friendly. When you compare this feature to Google Capture or other enterprise captures, they are very simple. It needs a good connection to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. When you implement this feature in the data center, you may suffer some complications with connecting to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. This should be improved in the future."

"One thing that can be improved, is to increase the quantity over predefine policy."

"The deployment side is quite complex."

"The solution should include protection against web page attacks like what is available in FortiWeb."

"The solution is tedious. It takes a lot of discrete settings so one needs to get detailed and granular when they use the solution. It takes you a whole lot of energy and concentration to configure. It needs to be much more straight-forward, like other web solutions."

"I would like to see the API Protection improved."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"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."

"Support is not that great."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"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."

"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."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is too high."

"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."

"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."

"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"

"I think the price is very high."

"As far as the pricing of F5 Advanced WAF I would rate it a four out of five depending on what features I am looking for. Imperva is more expensive."

"The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price."

"The cost is slightly above average."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"It is an expensive solution."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	25
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	31

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?

It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the rules per the requirements.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

Regarding the price, I think the cost is a bit higher compared to others. Earlier we were using Radware, and compared to Radware, it is very high. However, it is providing more features than Radwar...

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

In terms of additional features I would like to see from them in the future, I think the GTM is a bit complicated to configure, which I observed. Otherwise, LTM and WAF are straightforward. I faced...

What do you like most about Fastly?

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.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

What needs improvement with Fastly?

Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Comparisons

Compared 28% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 7% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 6% of the time

Radware Alteon vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 22% of the time

Cloudflare vs Fastly

Compared 20% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Product Reports

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

F5 Advanced WAF

January 2026

Download Fastly product report

January 2026

Overview

F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.

F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Sample Customers

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

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