F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Link11 comparison

F5 and Link11 are both solutions in the CDN category. F5 is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.8, while Link11 is ranked #19. F5 holds a 2.4% mindshare in CDN, compared to Link11’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Link11 users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

Link11 and F5 Distributed Cloud Services are cyber defense solutions providing DDoS protection and network security, respectively. Link11 holds an advantage in pricing and support, while F5 Distributed Cloud Services leads with feature richness.

Features: Link11 includes advanced DDoS protection, real-time monitoring, and efficient threat detection. F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers broad cloud-computing capabilities, extensive network security features, and seamless integration with advanced scalability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Link11's deployment model is straightforward, supported by effective customer service, prioritizing ease of use. F5 Distributed Cloud Services presents a flexible deployment model with high-touch customer service, though more complex, it is offset by its comprehensive support structure.

Pricing and ROI: Link11 is appealing to budget-sensitive buyers with competitive setup costs and promising ROI. Despite higher initial expenses, F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers a potentially superior long-term ROI attributed to its advanced features, justifying its premium pricing.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11 Report (Updated: July 2026).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11

July 2026

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 15.0%, down from 21.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.4%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Link11 is 1.9%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare	15.0%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	2.4%
Link11	1.9%
Other	80.7%

CDN

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

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Mohan Janarthanan

Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions

Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

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Pablo Frejlich

Chief Architect (Consultant) at Personal Consultant

Exceptional resilience and protection well-suited for medium to large businesses

The initial setup process is quite straightforward. Its complexity largely depends on the intricacies of your platform. If your platform spans multiple sites across the globe, requiring configuration of multiple instances and traffic routing, it can become more intricate. From our experience, even in companies with extensive platforms, the configuration process remains relatively simple. Once the instances are spun up and the initial configurations are in place, you can use their console application to set up your site or sites for traffic management. This involves configuring the sites and uploading SSL certificates. Even for those not well-versed in the intricacies of networking layers and rules, the out-of-the-box configurations already provide solid protection.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

"Cloudflare has positively impacted our organization by giving us flexibility to manage the DNS part, being quite fast, and allowing us to manage everything from a single dashboard, which is quite handy."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"There is no service as mature as Cloudflare that is also as easy to use, reliable, and hosted from excellent infrastructure."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"Their free account offers an awful lot of functionality and savings alone, before you get on to the minimal $20 a month for a Pro account which comes with its own great list of features."

"From a technical point of view, Cloudflare is the best CDN."

"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."

More Cloudflare pros

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."

"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."

"I appreciate the UI of F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the backend cost, alongside the actual value proposition that they provide with the load balancer, which is excellent."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."

"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."

"The main feature is using the rules and being able to see the traffic. It helps us find malicious traffic."

"It saved us a lot of time and money and we were able to use fewer resources on our side, saving about $15,000 to $20,000 a year in computing resources because we had the reverse proxy and the caching mechanism and used the platform as a CDN as well."

"Reblaze knows how to manage security. For me as, someone who knows little about security, it's good that I have a firm that optimizes everything according to their standards. It's their responsibility and they are fully hands-on."

"We like the website protection, it's really good, and the dashboard is really simple to use."

"The real-time monitoring and reporting are very good. There are information updates in their portal every two minutes. They also have the ability to spill it into Sumo Logic, for example. It's very easy to use."

"Reblaze provides us with a solution we can count on."

"Reblaze has saved us money by optimizing server usage and blocking malicious bots."

"Reblaze has just made things simpler for us."

Cons

"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"Support response time could be improved."

"I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years."

More Cloudflare cons

"One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."

"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."

"It would be beneficial if it had a workflow or a feature that could fine-tune settings based on high-level requirements."

"Some of the settings on the dashboard are confusing."

"The next release should have next-generation automation."

"I would like to have seen more automated reports. Maybe it has been improved in the last year and I'm just not aware of it. But from a managerial point of view, you want a summary report, a weekly report: How many attacks were blocked? How much bandwidth was saved due to the caching mechanism? What were the top-ten attacks that were tested on the network, etc? I could most likely have found all that data if I logged in to the system and ran different reports. It would be very helpful to get a management report on a weekly basis."

"The interface on the dashboard could be improved. Some of the settings are confusing which makes things difficult when you're trying to get a handle on the product."

"There is room for improvement in helping us understanding session management... We want Reblaze to catch and identify everything. We want to see the various devices doing one activity and to see, in a timeline, what's happened. We would like to see a more human-readable display to understand what's happening in the web app."

"Perhaps the automatic reporting could be better. I would like to have seen more automated reports."

"We have multiple products behind different instances of Reblaze. We have one instance for staging and then we have a production instance for multiple products. One of the things that we have requested is a unified view panel, so that we can see each of the instances in a unified view. That way, we won't have to go bouncing from instance to instance."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"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."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"There is still some room for improvement when it comes to bot management from Reblaze because they are relatively new compared to other vendors in the town."

"We found the cost to be a bit on the higher side, starting at approximately three to four thousand dollars for a small configuration."

"On a monthly basis we pay $750."

"I believe that for the six instances we have right now, it's costing us $16,000 per month."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Construction Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	2

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced.Specifically, ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

My main use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services is WAF protection.I am using F5 Distributed Cloud Services primari...

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

August 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services

August 2026

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Buyer's Guide

Link11

July 2026

Download Link11 product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Reblaze

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.

Link11, headquartered in Germany, offers cloud-based IT security services designed to prevent business disruptions, enhancing cyber resilience for IT networks and critical applications globally. Their services benefit industries across Europe, North America, and Asia with comprehensive protection.

Link11 provides a range of security and performance solutions, including Network Security, Web Application & API Protection, and Application Performance solutions. Their offerings encompass Network DDoS protection and an all-in-one WAAP solution, featuring Web Application Firewall, Web DDoS Protection, Bot Management, API Protection, and Secure CDN & DNS. A high-performance global network, monitored 24/7 by the Link11 Security Operations Center, ensures robust defense mechanisms.

What are the key features of Link11?

User-friendly dashboard simplifies monitoring and management.
Real-time monitoring provides instant visibility into potential threats.
Advanced DDoS protection safeguards against various attack vectors.
API integration enhances mobile app security.
Comprehensive bot management includes ATO and botnet blocking.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Seamless security management supported by dedicated customer support channels.
Efficient rule creation and prioritization streamline security workflows.
Continuous improvements in filtering against SQL and script injections enhance security.
Effective activity monitoring provides alerts on suspicious activities.

Link11 is suited for industries wanting to protect web applications against Layer 7 DDoS attacks, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and phishing attempts. Deployed on cloud models, Link11 integrates as a fundamental security layer, offering effective bot management and securing websites with multiple technologies.

Link11

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Information Not Available

CBC, Hermes, Gartner

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11

July 2026

Free Report: F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Link11 and other solutions. Updated: July 2026.

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