Fortinet FortiWeb vs Rapid7 Metasploit comparison

The compared Fortinet and Rapid7 solutions aren't in the same category. Fortinet is ranked #5 in WAF , with an average rating of 7.4, and holds a 8.2% mindshare in the category. Rapid7 is ranked #20 in VM , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Fortinet users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Rapid7 users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiWeb and Rapid7 Metasploit based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5, Microsoft and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF).

To learn more, read our detailed Web Application Firewall (WAF) Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 845,406 peers since 2012

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

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Vulnerability Management

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.

Read full review

Kacem CHAMMALI

IT Infrastructures Administrator at Esprit

Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb

The xFF, or X-Forwarded-For feature, IP reputation, and protected hostname. We can block access using the IP address, so no one can connect to our web server or website using the real IP. They need to use the FQDN instead. Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb and the option to protect the hostname. All traffic passes through FortiWeb. Machine learning capabilities in FortiWeb: I don't use machine learning all the time. In the initial phase of FortiWeb deployment, we use the learning process to detect the traffic passing through FortiGate to our website.

Read full review

Mani Bommisetty

Infrastructure patching Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Comprehensive insights with robust vulnerability detection and streamlined alert management

Rapid7 has a significant advantage in providing a clear picture of my environment. It provides insight and incident detection response capabilities. When deployed with the same agent in servers or endpoints, it identifies vulnerabilities and monitors data transmission to external sources. Rapid7 offers comprehensive features within one platform, eliminating the need to integrate multiple tools to see all alerts in one place.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"It's very user-friendly."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

More Cloudflare pros

"I have recently been looking at the SSL certificate features and the learning mode of the appliance. This appliance learns from the pattern of SSL attacks."

"FortiGate is a stable product."

"The ease of configuration is valuable. We have Azure WAF, we have OCI WAF, and we also have Cloud Armor for GCP, but their configuration isn't very easy. It's pretty simple in FortiWeb, and we can enable or configure whatever we want."

"The ability to configure multiple policies for different requirements is a strong feature of Fortinet FortiWeb."

"The solution has a good sandbox feature."

"The support services, performance, and pricing are all valuable features. The performance is excellent."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall (WAF)."

"FortiWeb offers machine learning in the latest product. This fixed many problems. There are no false negatives."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pros

"Rapid7 has a significant advantage in providing a clear picture of my environment."

"It allows us to concentrate solely on identified vulnerabilities without the hassle of additional setup."

"The option to generate phishing emails has proven to be very valuable in understanding the behavior of users."

"The solution is open source and has many small targetted penetration tests that have been written by many people that are useful. You can choose different subjects for the test, such as Oracle databases or Apache servers."

"When I compare Metasploit with Nessus, I find that Metasploit is faster and it does not burden the system as much."

"Rapid7 offers comprehensive features within one platform, eliminating the need to integrate multiple tools to see all alerts in one place."

"The Search Engineering feature is good."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the scripts, the modules, and the tools that the Rapid7 Metasploit framework has."

More Rapid7 Metasploit pros

Cons

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

"Technical support is lacking."

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"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."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"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."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

More Cloudflare cons

"It costs too much."

"The interface could have the interdependent elements arranged sequentially and wizards that go through most common deployment actions."

"I see no room for improvement at the moment."

"Fortinet WAF came out recently, and there is not much feedback about customer experience. For each project, customers ask about the scenarios and references of the customers who have implemented this solution, which we don't have. They need to simplify the customer experience and provide more information so that we can propose Fortinet Fortiweb as a WAF solution to customers and convince them. They need to improve their service and training. We need good training to implement and use it properly and know more about it. We still don't know much about Fortinet WAF. We didn't get any proper training sessions. Other vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto, Check Point, and Barracuda provide such sessions. Whenever we receive a request from a customer for this solution, we just give the price. We don't propose this solution because we don't know much about it. We propose whatever we are familiar with and what is supported."

"It is not entirely user-friendly."

"The initial setup in our data center was somewhat complex."

"Fortinet's technical support is pretty slow."

"The integration with other products should be improved."

More Fortinet FortiWeb cons

"We'd like them to offer better coverage of malware."

"I would like to see more capabilities, more functions, and more features. More types of attack vectors."

"Better automation capabilities would be an improvement."

"The reporting feature needs improvement. The time taken to fetch reports based on the number of events can be extensive, unlike Tenable, which is more user-friendly and faster."

"Metasploit cannot be installed on a machine with an antivirus."

"The open-source version has reporting limitations. You need to develop these capabilities yourself. Built-in reporting is an excellent feature for penetration testing, but it isn't a must-have. The solution could also cover more vulnerabilities. Metasploit has around 10,000 exploits in its library, but more is always better."

"Rapid7 Metasploit can add a GUI feature because it is only available online."

"Advanced Infrastructure should be implemented in the next release for better orchestration."

More Rapid7 Metasploit cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"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."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is fine now. We had to earlier negotiate the price."

"When I use any other firewall, I have to take a license. It could be a perpetual license or subscription-based. In both cases, we have to pay some amount in advance, whereas in the case of FortiWeb, when using it as a service, I am paying half a dollar only for the domain name, and then I am paying based on the traffic or the number of requests."

"Previously, for each project, the cost was $800 to $1,000 per application. Now, it's $100 to $120. For some of the applications, there is a 90% reduction, and for some of the applications, there is a 50% reduction. We're paying only $500 to $600."

"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb depends from customer to customer because some customers are considering using other solutions, such as Imperva. The price of Fortinet FortiWeb sits well for the middle-sized customers that we deal with."

"The license cost depends on the size of the box or the size of the solution. It can go from €200 Euros to a few hundred thousand Euros a year depending on your size."

"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."

"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"The solution is cheaper compared with other solutions. It has a yearly license."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pricing and cost advice

"We pay monthly. The pricing is reasonable."

"It is expensive. Our license expired, and our company is not thinking to renew because of our budget."

"I use the open-source version of this product. Pricing is not relevant."

"Rapid7 Metasploit is cheaper than Tenable.io Vulnerability Management."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product's pricing a six. So it's fairly priced."

"There are two versions available, one of which is the Pro version, and the other is the free version."

"The cost is approximately $15 per device."

"I have used the free version of Rapid7 Metasploit."

More Rapid7 Metasploit 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.

See recommendations

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

Educational Organization

41%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Educational Organization

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...

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 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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?

The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?

I would rate the licensing cost as seven out of ten, considering it good value for money. The price is affordable and...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?

There is room for improvement in the portability on multi-cloud environments. Enhanced DDoS integration to make Forti...

See all answers

What do you like most about Rapid7 Metasploit?

I use Rapid7 Metasploit for payload generation and Post-Exploitation.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rapid7 Metasploit?

Metasploit is cheaper than Nessus and offers a more robust community edition that provides a good experience for stud...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Rapid7 Metasploit?

While Metasploit excels in vulnerability assessment, it could improve in vulnerability management. Nessus currently h...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 23% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 15% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 2% of the time

More Fortinet FortiWeb Competitors

Tenable Nessus vs Rapid7 Metasploit

Compared 21% of the time

Acunetix vs Rapid7 Metasploit

Compared 13% of the time

Pentera vs Rapid7 Metasploit

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon Inspector vs Rapid7 Metasploit

Compared 9% of the time

Nodeware vs Rapid7 Metasploit

Compared 2% of the time

More Rapid7 Metasploit Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiWeb

March 2025

Download Fortinet FortiWeb product report

Buyer's Guide

Rapid7 Metasploit

March 2025

Download Rapid7 Metasploit product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Metasploit

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

Fortinet FortiWeb is a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that protects your web applications and APIs from attacks targeting known as well as unknown vulnerabilities. As the surface of your web applications evolves with each change of existing features and deployment of new features, your APIs are left exposed. Fortinet FortiWeb provides the board protection capabilities required to protect web applications without sacrificing performance or manageability.

Fortinet FortiWeb is an automatic, advanced multi-layer solution that provides secure protection by discerning irregular behavior and distinguishing between malicious and benign anomalies. In addition, the approach delivers powerful bot mitigation capacities which authorize harmless bots to connect while blocking malicious bot activity securely. Regardless of where an application is hosted, Fortinet FortiWeb will safeguard business applications by providing deployment options, such as virtual machines, hardware appliances, and containers that can be deployed in the data center, cloud environments, or in the cloud-native SaaS solution.

Fortinet FortiWeb Features and Benefits

APIs and web applications have become integral to the rising demand for business-critical applications. Now more than ever, businesses are in need of an automatic firewall that will provide them with security, without sacrificing performance or reliability. Fortinet FortiWeb offers a variety of features and benefits, including:

Security fabric integration: FortiWeb integrates with other Fortinet solutions to provide advanced protection from persistent threats.
Proven web application and API protection: FortiWeb safeguards applications from all DDOS attacks, malicious bot attacks, and OWASP Top-10 threats.
Advanced visual analytics: FortiWeb offers a unique visual reporting tool that other WAF solutions don’t by providing a detailed analysis of attack elements and sources.
Hardware-based acceleration: With fast and secure traffic encryption and decryption, FortiWeb provides best-in-class WAF protection.
ML-based threat detection: FortiWeb delivers multi-layer machine learning defense protection to defend against zero-day attacks and reduce false positives.
False positive mitigation tools: Reduce daily management of policies through advanced tools to guarantee only unwanted traffic is blocked.

Reviews from Real Users

Fortinet FortiWeb offers an industry-leading Web Application Firewall, and users are satisfied with it for a number of reasons, including the ability to control everything from the dashboard and the PCI-compliant reports it offers.

Carlos P., director of business and digital transformation at SERNIVEL3, notes, "You have the ability to control everything from one single dashboard."

A director at a tech service company, says, "Banks have to be compliant with PCI and other things, and FortiWeb is absolutely amazing in terms of providing these reports. Otherwise, they will have to spend a lot of time on them."

Fortinet

Attackers are always developing new exploits and attack methods—Metasploit penetration testing software helps you use their own weapons against them. Utilizing an ever-growing database of exploits, you can safely simulate real-world attacks on your network to train your security team to spot and stop the real thing.

Rapid7

Sample Customers

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

Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG

City of Corpus Christi, Diebold, Lumenate, Nebraska Public Power District, Prairie North Regional Health, Apptio, Automation Direct, Bob's Stores, Cardinal Innovations Healthcare Solutions, Carnegie Mellon University

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5, Microsoft and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.