

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and F5 Advanced WAF compete in the application security market. While Azure Gateway is praised for pricing and support, F5 Advanced WAF is favored for its robust features despite a higher price.
Features: Microsoft Azure Application Gateway offers Layer 7 integration for custom traffic monitoring, load balancing, and a web application firewall. It's appreciated for easy configuration in a SaaS model. F5 Advanced WAF provides behavior analysis, DDoS protection, and anti-bot measures. It includes an enterprise-class firewall with geo-blocking and traffic learning capabilities.
Room for Improvement: Azure Gateway could enhance scalability, simplify configuration, and improve documentation. It faces performance issues during certificate updates. F5 Advanced WAF could benefit from a more user-friendly interface, better logging, and enhanced threat intelligence.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Gateway is deployed in public and hybrid environments with varying support experiences. F5 Advanced WAF is mostly on-premises, known for stability but requires expertise for setup. Both have satisfactory support, though Azure experiences occasional service delays.
Pricing and ROI: Azure Gateway offers manageable pricing, ideal for cloud environments with a pay-as-you-go model. F5 WAF is higher-priced but considered worth it by users seeking extensive security features. Azure is cost-effective for smaller budgets, while F5 suits larger enterprises requiring comprehensive protection.
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.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
Microsoft Azure Application Gateway significantly impacts our cost savings while maintaining higher performance.
If we can use a shared resource, then the return on investment is really nice.
We have seen a return on investment in terms of time-saving and cost-saving by not creating our own infrastructure.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
F5 Advanced WAF provides the insights and notifications I need in terms of reporting and alerting.
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
I would say they provide the best support for Application Gateway because they own the product, so their support is top-notch.
There is room for improvement, specifically in paid support, by providing more direct contact.
I would rate Microsoft support as good because they have a very skilled technical support team in the background
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.
Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is a very scalable product.
It has the autoscaling feature, so there is not much concern around performance; it can scale significantly.
Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is a scalable solution.
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.
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
We have been using it for the past two to three years, and there have been good results with no problems so far.
The stability is good, and except for a few instances, I don't see the non-availability of Azure Cloud services.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
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.
There is excellent clarity in the LTM and the WAF.
One feature I mentioned is the support for non-HTTPS protocols such as TCP, which could allow one endpoint for all kinds of protocols.
There is room for improvement in terms of support, such as assigning agents directly for more straightforward engagement.
In future releases of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, I would like to see more AI functionalities and a better dashboard as well as some customizations.
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.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
We would prefer to have it cheaper, but it is still expensive.
Azure solutions are quite expensive.
When it comes to pricing for Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, I would rate it a seven out of ten.
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.
F5 Advanced WAF offers the best features that are capable of stopping any type of attack, and it is a really reliable and stable product that you can rely on to stop any type of attack.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
We are using it for some of the security features for our applications, particularly for securing traffic in transit with SSL.
The Web Application Firewall (WAF) in Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has been very effective in protecting applications from security threats.
The gateway's Web Application Firewall feature enhances security as it is the first entry point to your network from the outside world.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 Advanced WAF | 7.5% |
| Microsoft Azure Application Gateway | 5.4% |
| Other | 87.1% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 26 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 22 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 24 |
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.
Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.
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