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F5 Advanced WAF vs Radware Alteon comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare WAF offers quick ROI, crucial protection for e-commerce, saves bandwidth, and balances cost with valuable free features.
Sentiment score
7.6
F5 Advanced WAF offers ROI by saving time, reducing costs, enhancing security, and ensuring compliance for businesses.
Sentiment score
7.3
Radware Alteon offers quick implementation, affordability, robust threat blocking, boosting performance and satisfaction with immediate return on investment.
My experience with the pricing or licensing of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is that many features can be accessed for free, so the pricing is definitely reasonable.
Owner at Hga consulting
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.3
Cloudflare WAF support is mixed; responsive for some, but Indian customers face call availability and administrative issues.
Sentiment score
6.9
F5 Advanced WAF's customer service is highly professional and knowledgeable, but response speed and availability need improvement for some users.
Sentiment score
7.5
Radware Alteon support is praised for responsiveness and Spanish assistance but criticized for delays and specific regional challenges.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to contact them.
Owner at Hga consulting
The technical support of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between five and seven at maximum.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
Project Manager at IBM
While they resolve issues well, the time taken for responses to non-critical issues should be shorter.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
CEO at CyberApp
We never face support issues, and their team resolves any critical issues quickly once they are involved.
Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is a dedicated expert answering even the toughest questions.
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
The customer service and support are excellent.
IT Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall offers impressive scalability and automated management, but additional features may incur costs for smaller organizations.
Sentiment score
7.5
F5 Advanced WAF is scalable, efficiently handling large traffic, praised for flexibility, and easily upgraded to meet user needs.
Sentiment score
8.0
Radware Alteon offers seamless scalability and integration, supporting easy expansion and high performance under heavy loads for enterprises.
The scalability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between 8 to 9, as it depends upon the use cases and what exactly the client needs.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
If you need to scale up, such as moving from a lower model to a higher one, the configuration from the lower model can be migrated easily without issues.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
It handles peak loads and thousands of concurrent connections without exceeding 10% utilization.
Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have it deployed across multiple geographic locations, benefiting from load balancing resiliency.
IT Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is praised for stability, high performance, effective protection, daily use, and minimal downtime.
Sentiment score
8.4
F5 Advanced WAF is highly reliable and stable, rarely facing downtime, with user ratings of 8-10 for performance.
Sentiment score
8.3
Radware Alteon offers high stability with minimal downtime, effective updates, and user ratings of nine to ten for reliability.
The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize
F5 Advanced WAF is stable, and there is no doubt it is one of the best WAFs in the market.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
We've never faced downtime, even during peak transaction hours.
Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is minimal downtime, and the solution is quite stable.
IT Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
There are no difficulties with the deployment of Radware Alteon; it is quite straightforward.
Technical Manager at Secur Links
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare WAF needs feature enhancements, better usability, improved support, advanced DDoS protection, and solutions for latency and alerts.
F5 Advanced WAF needs improvements in pricing, usability, API protection, bot detection, deployment, and advanced integration features.
Radware Alteon needs improvements in automation, user interface, customer support, integration, security, and educational resources to enhance competitiveness.
The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available.
Network Architect at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
I think they're doing a good job with DNS and as support for any domains that I create or that my clients create, it's mandatory for me to ensure they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider.
Owner at Hga consulting
And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network.
CTO at PlayNirvana
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize
Another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
They keep integrating new features that sometimes break our production, but we use clustered systems, so we can test those software releases.
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Other OEMs offer free courses and hands-on labs on new technologies and features, which we find useful.
Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
In the future, I would like to see some other security features added, such as DDoS, which is Distributed Denial of Service.
Technical Manager at Secur Links
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall offers affordable, flexible pricing with no upfront costs, noted for competitiveness and included support services.
Enterprise buyers find F5 Advanced WAF's pricing high but justified in banking, with complex licensing and higher setup costs.
Enterprise buyers favor Radware Alteon for its competitive pricing, strong performance, and flexible, simple licensing options.
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
CEO at CyberApp
For our solution, it was right in the middle of price performance.
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
The cost of the Radware solution is reasonable and stable.
Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The implementation and running costs are quite high.
IT Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides comprehensive security features, easy setup, scalability, and competitive pricing with praised performance and stability.
F5 Advanced WAF offers robust application security with bot protection, DDoS mitigation, and customizable threat detection for improved efficiency.
Radware Alteon excels in availability, security, and load balancing with user-friendly GUI, scalability, and robust support services.
The custom rules and the geo-redundant geographical rule feature, which allows me to implement geographical rules for customers, add significant value.
Network Architect at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
The best features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall are multiple, including the WAF, rate limiter, and bot attack protection.
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools add a layer that we're able to visualize and see before it actually hits the local firewall.
Owner at Hga consulting
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.
Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It contains the logic of both negative and positive security combined.
CEO at CyberApp
The product allows us to manage multiple networks and VLANs into a single box and add numerous web services and farms efficiently.
Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The best feature of Radware Alteon is basically the configuration; how we configure it is very straightforward, and it is very simple to configure.
Technical Manager at Secur Links
I find the best features to be the flexibility and ease of use.
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Advanced WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Radware Alteon
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 5.3%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Radware Alteon is 2.0%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF5.3%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.7%
Radware Alteon2.0%
Other88.0%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
CTO at PlayNirvana
Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.
reviewer2797602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Granular security policies have protected critical applications and ensure safe user and admin access
Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a request gets blocked on the TCP layer, there should be traces or data to verify which source generated these requests, including the source and port information for initiation. These data are missing from F5 Advanced WAF. Besides that, another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients. Overall, I find everything else good. A wish list feature I have is for the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to respond more promptly. Their response time needs improvement; while they do not take excessive time, it can be enhanced, especially given it is a security product.
RaynielBadiola - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at Secur Links
Load balancing has simplified deployments and improves application performance monitoring
I don't think of features that will make Radware Alteon better because it is already better, but to be able to compete also with other competitors, the price is something to consider. It is not actually that expensive, but for their level, there are other load balancers with the same feature, but they have a lower price, so pricing is the only point I can give. In the future, I would like to see some other security features added, such as DDoS, which is Distributed Denial of Service. Currently, it has the Web Application Firewall feature, but in the future, they can also add a DDoS feature or a more in-depth DDoS feature.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise22
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...
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 r...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is a bit higher, but not that high. I would say for a good amount of revenue-generati...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
On the features I wish existed, Big-IP Advanced WAF is primarily an on-premises solution and in that solution, there ...
What needs improvement with Radware AppWall?
There is room for improvement in reducing the number of false positives I receive. We could benefit from more configu...
What is your primary use case for Radware AppWall?
We are a system integrator company in the Philippines, and we are selling Radware Alteon product. Radware Alteon is u...
What advice do you have for others considering Radware AppWall?
I would rate Alteon nine out of ten. The main reason I would recommend it is Radware's excellent support. I rate the ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
Alteon, Radware AppWall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Convergys
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Radware Alteon and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.