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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Sophos Cybersecurity as a 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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th)
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th), API Security (7th)
Sophos Cybersecurity as a S...
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
AWS Marketplace (79th)
 

Mindshare comparison

CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Distributed Cloud Services2.4%
Cloudflare15.8%
Akamai12.0%
Other69.8%
CDN
AWS Marketplace Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service0.2%
Stardog Enterprise Knowledge Graph Platform0.4%
Freight Emissions API - Carbon data for shipping and logistics0.3%
Other99.1%
AWS Marketplace
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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.
Vikas-Gupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Eon Networks
Automated threat response has ensured uninterrupted operations and provides clear 24x7 security visibility
One feature which we would like to have in the product is the inventory. For example, if I have the agent installed on each machine and server, why can't we fetch the inventory details from the console? If you look at the competition products such as CrowdStrike, they give clear visibility into what software is installed, what legitimate tools are installed, and what software is not even licensed or may not be secure to install. Those things are reported back to the concerned team, maybe the systems teams, and they can use it brilliantly. Unfortunately, Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service doesn't provide that kind of visibility into what software or tools are installed on a particular system. There is a feature which requires running what you call an XG script to fetch those kinds of details. However, it is not on the GUI as other competitor companies are providing. That is the one feature we really miss. In terms of service and support, I don't think there is an issue because it is already a brilliant five-star service support. The visibility feature that I already mentioned is the only primary feature which we are missing. The rest is absolutely fine. I don't think there is anything else which should be there.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The overall performance of this solution is what makes it one of the best solutions on the market."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"Because our website is blazing fast it improves our conversion rates."
"If you don't want to spend too much time hosting your own DNS server or managing the domain, Cloudflare is a great way to rapidly get websites and services online."
"Another reason it's awesome is that you don't need your server to handle every request."
"DDoS protection is this product’s most valuable feature."
"Cloudflare improves performance on my websites and is a great partner for cloud infrastructure for anyone who wants to use the security service and other features."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and 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."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
"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 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."
"Since the day we started using Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service MDR, there has not been a single incident."
"Since using Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service, I have seen measurable improvements such as faster incident response, fewer successful attacks, and significant efficiency gains for IT teams, with independent evaluations showing near-perfect detection rates and response times under two minutes, translating directly into saved hours and reduced risk."
"Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service has positively impacted our organization by being very beneficial for our business and serving as a valuable income source."
"Overall, I find Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service to be very great and very fast."
"Overnight containment has eliminated downtime from late-night breaches, and ransomware attempts have been stopped before they spread."
 

Cons

"However, what I still fail to understand is that why aren't they offering domains themselves."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"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 pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"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."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"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 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."
"Unfortunately, Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service doesn't provide that kind of visibility into what software or tools are installed on a particular system."
"Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service is continuously consuming more resources, which leads to slower PC performance, so reducing resource consumption would be better for both Sophos products and our sales."
"While Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service has been very effective, I would like to see more customizable reports that are perhaps more intuitive or easier for the different departments."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A free version of the solution is available."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"We are using the free version."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"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."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Construction Company
38%
Security Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise1
 

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 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.
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 needs improvement with Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service?
Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service is continuously consuming more resources, which leads to slower PC performance, so ...
What is your primary use case for Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service?
Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service is our main solution to ensure secure operations as we build and connect more clien...
What advice do you have for others considering Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service?
When advising others about using Sophos Cybersecurity as a Service, I emphasize that the main reason to choose Sophos...
 

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.
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