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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
19th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 10.7%, down from 11.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed Moamen - PeerSpot reviewer
Protects applications with versatile authentication features
F5 offers a versatile solution that can be integrated with APM in cases where integration with an external IDB is needed. It is useful for authentication backup if the on-prem directory service is unavailable. Additionally, its WAF functionality is valuable for protecting applications from attacks. It is a versatile and strong solution that's easy to understand and deploy.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support
The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There are a lot of good features."
"The valuable features vary from customers to customers. Some customers are okay with the basic features of the WAF, and some customers use advanced WAF with a few other features."
"It ensures compliance with security standards by providing features like PCI DSS checks."
"F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are SSL uploading, signature, and anomaly detection. It is overall a high-quality solution."
"Provides good protection from attacks."
"F5 Advanced WAF is a comprehensive community platform with a strong commitment, making it valuable for businesses."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its ability to have a pool of resources that can distribute your traffic, and that is a plus for me. My company tried to look into a competitor, Imperva, but it was lacking that capability, so F5 Advanced WAF outperforms Imperva."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"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."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
 

Cons

"They should work on the virtualization of NGINX."
"The accuracy of the automatic learning feature needs improvement."
"Scalability could be improved."
"This solution can be made more user-friendly."
"The Sandbox integration feature could be improved."
"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve the precision of the scanning. There are many false positives. They should improve their threat database."
"People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux"
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"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."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is comparable to a Rolls-Royce. Its price is a bit high when you compare it with other vendors. F5 Advanced WAF is a bit expensive. The customer was on a three-year plan and it was around $560,000."
"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."
"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."
"F5 Advanced WAF is not a cost-effective solution. Although they are attempting to reduce prices with their VE and cloud options, they are more expensive than other solutions. The solution is more expensive on average."
"F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."
"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."
"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."
"I think the price is very high."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
I do not have anything in mind right now that needs improvement. Generally, it works well. If we need any specific feature, we approach F5 directly.
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 needs improvement with Fastly?
What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is ve...
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.