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F5 Advanced WAF vs Sucuri 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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
Sucuri
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (22nd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (14th), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (12th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Richard Polyak - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable
Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.
David Shlingbaum - PeerSpot reviewer
Simple solution and good WAF
Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section. Users get errors or EBAs, and if they want to read about it, they need to find it in the help section of the site. It would be more helpful to allow users to see more information and tips immediately from within the alert.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"The best solution for WAF."
"The support experience is better than average."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are SSL uploading, signature, and anomaly detection. It is overall a high-quality solution."
"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."
"This solution is an enterprise-class firewall that provides both load-balancing and security."
"Despite a few issues, F5 Advanced WAF is performing well for me."
"The solution is easily accessible on mobile and laptop devices."
"I like all of the features, but the main one is the attack signatures."
"The most valuable part is the analytics and visualization."
"It significantly eases the workload and streamlines the initial setup required to protect a website."
"The initial setup was straightforward. Straight forward because the plugin can simply be installed and then it does its job. It's not complex, there is no learning curve. The online scan is simple, you put in the website address and the scan gives us a report on the browser itself. It's simple to use."
"I use it as a WAF, which is basically a web firewall to monitor and block traffic to our web server."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"Domain name scanning since it allows us to scan all our domain names and determine whether it has malware or if is reported as phishing."
 

Cons

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"The deployment side is quite complex."
"The interface is old-looking, it's not modern, which is why it's not always comfortable to use."
"It's a powerful tool yet can be complex for new users."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve resource usage, it is CPU intensive. Additionally, adding automated remediation would be a benefit. For example, an easy button alerts us of the events that are occurring, and what we want to do at the time. An automated approach where somebody could be alerted very quickly. Instead of going and reconfiguring everything, an automated approach is what I'm looking at."
"The BNS module needs improvement."
"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."
"I would like for there to be a cloud-based solution, this would also help to improve scalability."
"The solution should include protection against web page attacks like what is available in FortiWeb."
"It would greatly benefit customers if they implemented an online chat or messaging system for quicker assistance."
"In terms of improvement, the cost factor is always there."
"I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that we have found sometimes customers or Google saying that there is something wrong with the website but Sucuri says that the site is clean so we do have to look at the site manually which means that the Sucuri scan does not pick up anything and everything."
"Confident score: Currently it does not have one and there are cases that most websites flagged are false-positives."
"Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section."
"The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I would include more sites in the protection."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The price is reasonable."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."
"There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support."
"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"
"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."
"F5 Advanced WAF is not a cost-effective solution. Although they are attempting to reduce prices with their VE and cloud options, they are more expensive than other solutions. The solution is more expensive on average."
"I am not sure about pricing but licenses are available on Google."
"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."
"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."
"Sucuri offers different plans, both the standard plan and an advanced plan. So there are different plans to choose from."
"I’d simply say it’s really worth it."
"It stands out as a more cost-effective option compared to other cloud-based security services like Cloudflare or JetPass."
"The ROI has been very good. Because of the solution, I have a tax break. The site developers were not always experienced people. We used to pay more for cleaning up the site when it was infected. Now, we have peace of mind knowing that the solution will clean up the site and that we won't have to go through the unnecessary process of restoring it from a backup. The protection on the WAF and the measures for backups have also prevented our site from going down."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
43%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
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?
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost, leading to amb...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
F5 Advanced WAF sells perpetual licenses as perpetual assets during sales without informing me that support ends afte...
What do you like most about Sucuri?
The initial setup was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sucuri?
The pricing is very reasonable. Sucuri offer other features as an add-on, such as backup, but these have an additiona...
What needs improvement with Sucuri?
The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I woul...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
The Loft Salon, Tom McFarlin, WPBeginner, Taylor Town, Everything Everywhere, Financial Ducks in a Row, Chubstr, Real Advice Gal, Sujan Patel, Wallao, List25, School the World
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Sucuri and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,485 professionals have used our research since 2012.