F5 Silverline Managed Services vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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DejanBlagojevic

Presales Engineer at Exclusive-networks

Mitigates more bot activity when defending web applications than any other vendor but comes at a price

F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it. We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.

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Shehzad Ali

Information Security and Compliance Officer at Carnation

Offers time and cost savings with integration, but user interface needs improvement

We are using it for our internal application development. We are testing those features of application gateways. We are integrating it with our solutions, application, Azure Application Gateway Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well. It provides a range of services, so it…

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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

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"It's very user-friendly."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

More Cloudflare pros

"The stability of the solution is very good."

"F5 technical support is really good."

"We have a lot of businesses that we put behind this solution, and it has really helped us in terms of monitoring the logs and incidents."

"The product’s UI is easy to understand."

"It's a good front end for public infrastructure"

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."

"The most valuable features are the configuration and configuring the process."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway gives us a lot of benefits, including domain mapping."

"Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well."

"Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the performance side of things, which is why we use it."

"Azure Application Gateway's most valuable feature is ease of use. The configuration is straightforward. It isn't difficult to adjust the size of your instances in the settings. You can do that with a few clicks, and the configuration file is the same way. You can also set rules and policies with minimal time and effort."

"We use the product in front-end and back-end applications to do the load balancing smartly."

"The tool is easy to use and quite flexible. It has policy management features as well. The solution screens all traffic to our web applications before passing it to the application. We recently tested it on one of our poorly developed applications, and the upgrade gave us a 100% result based on our tests. It's very effective as a security measure, and people can detect threats even through the web application."

"WAF feature replicates the firewall."

"The solution's most valuable feature is an HTTP solution and SSL certificate. It is also easy to use."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pros

Cons

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"DNS Management."

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

"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."

"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."

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."

More Cloudflare cons

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better."

"Sometimes tech support can be slow. They take more time assigning engineers to complex issues, however, they resolve the issues by joining me to fix them."

"We need to have support for cloud protection, which is not offered by this solution."

"The price is high in comparison to other products."

"Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles, optimization deployments, and compression profiles for better performance."

"I just hope the price can be cheaper."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market."

"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

"One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS."

"In the next release, the solution could improve the integration with Service Mesh and other Azure Security Services."

"The graphical interface needs improvement because it is not user friendly."

"The support can be improved when you are configuring the system rules. The Disaster Recovery feature can be added in the next release. The price of the solution can be reduced a bit."

"Application Gateway’s limitation is that the private and the public endpoint cannot use the same port."

"It does not have the flexibility for using public IPs in version 2."

"The security of the product could be adjusted."

"I believe that there is room for improvement in terms of additional functionality. It is an advantage to have features readily available for configuration without needing customer-defined rules."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"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."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"We are using the free version."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has less price than other application gateway solutions."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is expensive."

"It is not expensive."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is a pretty affordable product. My company needs to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs of the solution. The additional costs apart from the licensing costs of the solution vary."

"The solution's pricing is not complex. It is not expensive from our point of view."

"Regarding pricing for Azure Application Gateway, I would rate it at seven."

"I rate the price of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway an eight out of ten."

"The cost is not an issue."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

21%

Insurance Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...

What do you like most about F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The initial setup is straightforward.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The solution is expensive, however, the quality and performance are good.

What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?

We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...

How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 24% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 12% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Front Door vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 11% of the time

HAProxy vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 9% of the time

NetScaler vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 9% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

F5 Silverline Managed Services

Download F5 Silverline Managed Services product report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Download Microsoft Azure Application Gateway product report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

F5's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.

Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

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

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway