F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Wallarm NG WAF comparison

F5 and Wallarm are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #16 with an average rating of 8.8, while Wallarm is ranked #39. F5 holds a 2.0% mindshare in WAF, compared to Wallarm’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Wallarm users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 4, 2025

Wallarm NG WAF and F5 Distributed Cloud Services are competing cybersecurity solutions. Wallarm NG WAF generally stands out due to its affordability and ease of deployment, while F5 Distributed Cloud Services leads with its extensive features and integration capabilities.

Features: Wallarm NG WAF offers automatic security updates, real-time threat detection, and adaptive filtering algorithms. F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a wide range of cloud-based security tools and seamless integration with diverse environments, supporting enhanced scalability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Wallarm NG WAF offers a straightforward deployment process and responsive customer support, ensuring quick integration. F5 Distributed Cloud Services features a more complex yet adaptable deployment model, capable across various infrastructures with well-regarded customer service, though often requiring more time to deploy.

Pricing and ROI: Wallarm NG WAF is competitive in setup costs and delivers fast ROI, appealing for cost-focused decisions. F5 Distributed Cloud Services, despite a higher initial investment, is valued for its extensive feature set and long-term ROI benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Wallarm NG WAF Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Wallarm NG WAF

June 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 Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 3.8%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Wallarm NG WAF is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	3.8%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	2.0%
Wallarm NG WAF	1.0%
Other	93.2%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

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.

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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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it_user796242

Information Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Helps us to monitor attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them

Set up Wallarm as a reverse proxy. Do not replace your web server. Use Wallarm first in monitoring mode, then learn from Wallarm which type of request is false positive and which type of request is not. This process takes a couple of weeks for very highly-loaded web applications (few millions of unique visitors in one month). Then you can turn Wallarm into blocking mode and everything will be fine. Do not forget to build a monitoring system, the wave, and API for it. Before we started using Wallarm, I already knew Ivan (CEO) and Stepan (COO) from a couple of years before. Ivan had his own security company and Stepan was working on a Russian security magazine called Xakep. They told us that they wanted to create a new WAF and already had a working version of it. They asked me to test it. We did tests, and it was really good. After few month after testing, we signed an agreement. Our choice was made not because we knew these guys for a long time, but because the product was really cool and we were glad to start using it as one of the first on the market!

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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

"I have not had any issues with this solution, and I would recommend it to others who are interested in using it."

"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."

"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."

"The initial setup process is simple."

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"It is configurable via API."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"With active threat detection, we are no longer over-swamped with tons of useless events."

"The most powerful feature is the ability to first learn what type of query to make to your web application when it is attacked and what type of query creates a false positive to your app."

"Perimeter control and active vulnerability scanner are the most valuable features."

"Vulnerability scanner and WAF are valuable features."

"Helps us to monitor situation in regards to attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them."

"They are the only solution that fits our success criteria and business objectives: WAF must have a low (<5%) false negative rate and be ready to protect from all well-known web attacks."

Cons

"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."

"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."

"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."

"WAF doesn't directly affect bandwidth costs. It saves costs on protection. However, with the correct setup, it's difficult to determine if it saves costs overall due to the fixed enterprise plan fee."

"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."

"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"Technical support is 6 or 7 out of 10. Sometimes we have had trouble with communication and understanding."

"There were several stability issues during the first pilot."

"The biggest problem for us was the stability and speed using the first version of Wallarm. Now, it is fine."

"Wallarm uses a learning mechanism to detect attacks and to avoid false positives. If Wallarm blocks some illegitimate request, then you can go to the management console and mark this request as false positive, but sometimes this does not work properly."

"It needs more customization in PDF reports."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"The solution is expensive."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"It is not too pricey."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"Pricing must be cheaper than the competition and the licensing must be good."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Government

11%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

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

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

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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...

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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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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

August 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services

August 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

August 2026

Download Wallarm NG WAF product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

Wallarm NG-WAF

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall integrates DDoS protection, load balancing, and firewall capabilities. Its ease of use, configurability, and robust security measures make it a versatile choice for protecting web applications.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive defense against threats with advanced reporting and robust security measures. It includes DNS integration, rate limiting, and extensive rule sets, all within a SaaS model that allows API configurability. Users value its caching, scalability, and pricing, although enhancements are needed in rate-limiting and third-party integration. Improvements in customer support, especially in India, real-time controls, and user documentation are also desired. Users seek a more intuitive dashboard, better log management, and improved alert systems, along with multitenancy capabilities and enhanced reporting.

What are the key features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

DDoS Protection: Shields applications from denial-of-service attacks
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution
DNS Integration: Enhances domain name system security
Rate Limiting: Controls traffic flow and reduces abuse
Extensive Rule Sets: Offers customizable security rules

What benefits and ROI can users find in reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing business needs
Pricing: Offers reasonable pricing structure
Caching: Improves application performance and speed
Configurable Security: Provides customizable defense settings
Efficient Management: Simplifies security and application control

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall finds application in industries like banking and retail by acting as a comprehensive security gateway, managing authentication and authorization while protecting web applications from malicious Layer 7 traffic. It also implements load balancing, CDN, and zero-trust policies, supported by advanced reporting, analytics tools, and threat scoring to meet specific industry needs.

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.

Wallarm NG WAF provides advanced security by integrating machine learning, making it essential for modern web applications. It offers protection against sophisticated threats and automates many processes.

Wallarm NG WAF leverages AI-driven technology to deliver robust security measures. It helps in defending web applications from cybersecurity threats with enhanced threat detection and response capabilities. Beyond vulnerability insights, Wallarm enhances security protocols, scales with growing online demands, and ensures comprehensive threat coverage, fostering a safer web environment.

What are the key features of Wallarm NG WAF?

AI-Powered Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates sophisticated attacks efficiently.
Automated Security Updates: Continuously updates defense strategies without manual intervention.
Flexible Deployment: Easily integrates across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid setups.
Scalability: Adapts to growing traffic volumes with consistent protection.
Detailed Reporting: Provides comprehensive analytics on web security posture.

What benefits can users expect from Wallarm NG WAF?

Increased Security: Enhances threat detection and reduces vulnerabilities.
Operational Efficiency: Reduces manual intervention with automated tasks.
Cost-Effectiveness: Optimizes security expenditure by preventing potential breaches.
Time Savings: Automates repetitive actions, saving valuable time for IT teams.

In industries like finance, e-commerce, and healthcare, Wallarm NG WAF is implemented to ensure data protection and compliance with stringent security standards. Its adaptability allows it to meet industry-specific requirements, offering specialized configurations tailored to each sector's unique demands.

Wallarm

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Information Not Available

Panasonic. Miro. Rappi. Wargaming. Gannett. Omio. Acronis. Workforce Software. Tipalti. SEMRush.

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Wallarm NG WAF

June 2026

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Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Wallarm NG WAF and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.

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