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

"The initial setup was was easy to install."

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

"The product has valuable features for load balancing, monitoring tools, and HPXpress services."

"The bot defense capability, as well as protection from brute force attacks and OWASP Top Ten, are notable features."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily."

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

"The solution is stable."

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

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

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

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

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

"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."

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

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"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."

More Fastly pros

Cons

"It's sometimes difficult to customize APIs with F5 Advanced WAF."

"Most customers encounter stability issues with the product's Big-IP logs."

"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."

"This solution can be made more user-friendly."

"The accuracy of the automatic learning feature needs improvement."

"The solution should include RASP for another level of protection at the code itself."

"They should work on the virtualization of NGINX."

"F5 Advanced needs to improve its bot protection. The solution needs to have machine learning to learn the behavior of the customer to recognize the human versus the bot. This is a difficult feature to explain to our customers. I would like documentation about the bot feature to make it easier for the customer to understand."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"Support is not that great."

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"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."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

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

"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."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."

"Licensing fees for this solution are paid on a yearly basis."

"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."

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

"The price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve it is expensive."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"F5 Advanced WAF pricing structure should be adjusted to meet the need of small to medium-sized companies."

"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."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"It is an expensive solution."

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

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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

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

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

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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

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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

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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