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F5 Advanced WAF vs SiteLock comparison

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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

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
SiteLock
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
38th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (46th), CDN (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (27th)
 

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 SiteLock is 1.5%, up from 0.4% 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%
SiteLock1.5%
Other88.5%
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.
it_user723534 - PeerSpot reviewer
Guitarist at a media company with self employed
It's not easy to get out once you're in
Sitelock may perform a useful service, but be wary of giving them your credit card information. When you sign on for the paid service, Sitelock: * Hides (makes it difficult to find) that they default the auto-renew (you can't sign up without agreeing to have them automatically bill your credit card every year). * Hides (makes it difficult to find) how to stop auto-renew: * You can't just stop auto-renew from your billing panel, the way you can with reputable businesses. * You have to hunt their website for a link (in extremely small font) to the page which contains instructions for cancelling. * When you get to that page, turns out it's the 5000+ word "Terms of Service" document, which you have to scour to find a phone number. Then, you have to call and get put on hold (or if you like, they will call you back three days later). Once you finally get through, you have to jump through a lot of security hoops. All of the above, just to cancel the service. Their product may or may not be OK, but be forewarned that with Sitelock, it's not easy to get out once you're in.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."
"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"The most valuable features of the F5 Advanced WAF are the enhanced ASM and the performance, and additionally, the usability and effectiveness are very good."
"Very easy to implement and works well."
"F5 Advanced WAF has benefited our company by protecting us against revenue loss, preventing hacks that would have taken us offline or caused us a loss of revenue in different areas."
"Overall, F5 Advanced WAF is a strong, dependable enterprise solution that works best when seen as a long-term security platform rather than a quick add-on; once properly designed, sized, and tuned, it runs quietly in the background and effectively does its job without constant attention."
"F5 Advanced WAF has very good stability and scalability, and its initial setup was straightforward."
"The best solution for WAF."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its grand unity of the implementation, where you have the freedom to configure based on how it affects your use case or your organization. With the default setting of implicit deny, you can gradually start defining and deploying the tool to align with your environment, whether it is outdated, recent, or futuristic. This allows you to customize the solution to protect you from threat actors. You have the ability to define what the advanced threat act should do - whether it should alert, deny, or both - and it will deliver based on your configuration. Unlike other online solutions, F5 Advanced WAF provides flexibility to deliver to your unique environment the way you want."
"I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it."
"Not only did SiteLock's website scanner find the issue with my website, but with SiteLock I was able to implement a security system to prevent future breaches."
"It seems to provide a bit of useful information on website health."
"It seems to provide a bit of useful information on website health."
 

Cons

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."
"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."
"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."
"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"The reporting could be more granular."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"The Sandbox integration feature could be improved."
"There are opportunities for improvement in updating the user interface to a more modern look."
"The solution's dashboard could be improved."
"I think the deployment templates can be better."
"I would like for there to be a cloud-based solution, this would also help to improve scalability."
"I would like to see improved features in the F5 Advanced WAF solution, especially with a focus on enabling Kubernetes fully."
"I would like to see additional controls."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve resource usage, it is CPU intensive."
"Sitelock may perform a useful service, but be wary of giving them your credit card information."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The solution is expensive."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"It is not too pricey."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"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."
"There are different licenses available to use F5 Advanced WAF, such as BT, ASM, and LPM."
"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."
"The cost is slightly above average."
"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"
"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."
"F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."
"You can't just stop auto-renew from your billing panel, the way you can with reputable businesses."
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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%
Construction Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

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
No data available
 

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 do you recommend for a securing Web Application?
That's one of the most critical questions any development team faces! Securing a web application requires a layered a...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
galaxyguitar.com, robertasinc.com, indiarunning.com, comprarenpr.com, idbasolutions.com, newgrip.com
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. SiteLock and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.