

NGINX App Protect and F5 Advanced WAF compete in web application security. F5 Advanced WAF seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive threat detection and strong load balancing features.
Features: NGINX App Protect is valued for its flexibility, reverse proxy capabilities, and its open-source nature. It effectively manages traffic and integrates seamlessly with other solutions, offering features like auto-learning and bot protection. F5 Advanced WAF offers advanced threat detection using AI, robust load balancing, and exceptional DDoS protection, making it highly customizable and stable.
Room for Improvement: NGINX App Protect could improve its security features and compatibility with other systems. There is a need for an enhanced upgrade process and better support portal, alongside improved API exposure for automation. F5 Advanced WAF could enhance its reporting capabilities and address its high pricing. Simplified deployment and better integration with Kubernetes and cloud environments are desired.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NGINX App Protect offers deployment flexibility across private and hybrid clouds but faces challenges in high-throughput scenarios. Its technical support can be costly and slow. F5 Advanced WAF supports a wide range of environments including public and hybrid clouds. Although the setup is complex, its comprehensive features make the process worthwhile. Its customer service is proactive, albeit premium cost may be a concern.
Pricing and ROI: NGINX App Protect is considered expensive, yet it offers a satisfactory return on investment, particularly for its ease of integration in CICD pipelines. Pricing is moderate with costs associated with annual subscriptions. F5 Advanced WAF is seen as a premium product. Its high pricing can be an obstacle for smaller businesses, yet its robust features offer significant value, yielding a high return on investment, especially for larger enterprises.
A large volume of malicious traffic was blocked at the WAF layer, preventing issues from reaching the backend servers, which reduced emergency troubleshooting and application team involvement, ultimately lowering operational stress and incident cost savings without requiring additional security tools.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
F5 Advanced WAF protects our organization and provides security, achieving a return on investment.
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.
They were quick and efficient when we had 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.
It is a quality solution, and I would rate its stability as eight out of ten.
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.
Whenever something goes wrong or we have to whitelist anything, it clearly indicates where to go and where I have to make modifications.
There was more information from F5 regarding hardware requirements and specifications to deploy the service.
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.
After implementing F5 Advanced WAF, we saw a significant reduction in web-based attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and automated malicious traffic, allowing us to block real threats before they reached the backend server.
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.
The most valuable feature is the ability to operate in a DevOps environment and to be configured through API and pipeline by the developers themselves.
Detecting bots and blocking IPs have proven effective for securing applications.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 Advanced WAF | 7.8% |
| NGINX App Protect | 2.0% |
| Other | 90.2% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 25 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
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.
NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:
NGINX App Protect offers:
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