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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Radware Cloud WAF Service comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 ...
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Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
14th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), API Security (7th)
Radware Cloud WAF Service
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.5%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Radware Cloud WAF Service is 1.9%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Radware Cloud WAF Service1.9%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.5%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services1.9%
Other91.7%
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.
Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
AT
SOC Analyst at Adani Enterprises Ltd
Has significantly improved threat visibility and reduced false positives through intelligent bot detection and real-time analysis
The best features of Radware Cloud WAF Service that I prefer most include the bot protection. Its deployment was very smooth and flexible when I started deploying it. The reporting and visibility feature of the Bot Manager are noteworthy, as the dashboard gives clear insight into the traffic, activity, and block threats. The AI threat intelligence feature is quite impressive. In terms of blocking unknown threats and attacks, I assess Radware Cloud WAF Service as quite impressive; if I have to rate it out of 10, I would rate it eight and a half. The automated analytics for looking at events with Radware Cloud WAF Service is generally fine, and whenever we use it, it gives almost perfect results. In API protection with Radware Cloud WAF Service, we have multiple applications that we are using currently, and whenever there is any threat related to an API, it helps us provide detailed insight. Additionally, whenever there is unusual API traffic, it helps us monitor and detect threats.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is configurable via API."
"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"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."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services has had a very positive impact on our organization by strengthening security, simplifying networking, and improving visibility across multi-cloud environments."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and 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."
"The solution offers good protection."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring dashboard that we access through the portal."
"Radware Cloud WAF Service has positively impacted my organization by providing peace of mind for the team and regulatory compliance, since having the application properly protected meets our banking field requirements."
"I am currently satisfied with Radware Cloud WAF Service because it is a great tool to protect Layer 7 applications."
"Geo-blocking is one of the most valuable features we use the most; most of our users are in North, Central, and South America, so we use geo-blocking to block access from other countries."
"It integrates seamlessly with our infrastructure, allowing us to manage DDoS attacks and load balancing efficiently."
"The interface is quite concise and clear, and it is easy to navigate."
"The best features Radware Cloud WAF Service offers include ease of use, which is quite easy to set up within our network, along with scalability and performance."
 

Cons

"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."
"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 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."
"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 Cloud Portal has room for improvement."
"Sometimes, I encounter issues with password reset."
"We've had some issues with putting certificates in."
"The log feature in Radware Cloud WAF Service has some limitations."
"Radware does not have much online training available to help customers get the most out of this solution."
"Radware Cloud WAF Service could improve by possibly offering greater availability in Spanish for support, as generally there are English-speaking engineers, which might represent a challenge for some people."
"API integration and documentation need to be improved. There should be more detailed documentation for API usage, rate limiting, CNAME, and DDoS functions. A lot of articles need to be added to their portal."
"The initial setup was complex and took a long time to complete."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"It is not too pricey."
"The solution is expensive."
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
Information not available
"The pricing is fair."
"When compared to Akamai and F5, Radware's pricing and licensing are highly competitive."
"I believe the prices are fair."
"The pricing is fair; it's neither particularly cheap nor expensive."
"Radware Cloud WAF Service falls within a mid-range price bracket compared to other web application firewall solutions."
"The pricing is fair. We compared Radware to others using industry reviews and Radware is at the top right now."
"We are based in El Salvador and don't have a direct license with Radware; we purchase the license through resellers. The pricing is reasonable, as I managed an Akamai product in a previous position, and Cloud WAF is competitively priced."
"The price is a bulk average."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

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 Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise45
 

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 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.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I need to think about this for the future. F5 Distributed Cloud Services needs to create links with Amazon and Google...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I collect reviews for F5 Distributed Cloud Services and F5 Silverline Managed Services. I work with F5 Distributed Cl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Cloud WAF Service?
The cost of Radware Cloud WAF Service is actually a bit high, but given all these benefits, the investment makes sense.
What needs improvement with Radware Cloud WAF Service?
To improve Radware Cloud WAF Service, I believe it should enable full application and API coverage to ensure all web ...
What is your primary use case for Radware Cloud WAF Service?
My main use case for Radware Cloud WAF Service is protection against OWASP Top 10 and zero-day attacks, API discovery...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
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No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
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Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Radware Cloud WAF Service and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.