Fortinet FortiWeb vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

Fortinet FortiWeb vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

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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 March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiWeb is 7.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is 1.3%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiWeb	7.5%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.4%
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)	1.3%
Other	85.8%

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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HameedAhmed

Joint Director at PAA

Security threats have been reduced through seamless deployment and strong integration with other tools

I have used Fortinet FortiWeb's integration features. We have easily integrated all of the applications with the product. Most of the applications we are using are in-house built. My technical team is looking after the best features. I have not used it extensively for maybe two and a half years. I have been involved in the installation, but I am not actually using the product. I work with it from time to time but not extensively. I would assess Fortinet FortiWeb's adaptive machine learning and artificial intelligence as having new patches installed regarding artificial intelligence, but when we bought it, I think the learning feature was there. Now they have installed artificial intelligence features through patches. We have a complete portfolio of Fortinet in our organization, including FortiMail, Fortinet FortiWeb, and FortiGate, along with multi-factor authentication. All of the products are from Fortinet. Fortinet tools integrate with each other and work in conjunction. I think Fortinet FortiWeb has helped us meet regulatory compliance because we are not a regulatory organization, but our sister organization is regulatory. We have regulatory compliance with the International Civil Aviation Authority, whose audit teams have checked our data center and these security products, and they are satisfied with us. The question about leveraging Fortinet FortiWeb's automated policy management does not pertain to my domain because I am not so technical, but I am in a management role now. My engineer is more technical than me. I would rate this product an eight point five out of ten.

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reviewer2161107

Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Room for improvement with user interface while competitive pricing impresses

It is managed through Infrastructure as Code, so all configurations can be managed in the code itself, which is beneficial. Because it uses rules, it is easy to set up, and we have many different sites where the configurations are straightforward. Though the UI is not very interactive, which is a downside, we can manage many things. The UI is not very intuitive and could be better. However, we manage all the configurations through code, which is easy to maintain. It has extensive anomaly detection capabilities, so the traffic is classified into several categories where thresholds can be defined and customized based on false positives and false negatives. This is advantageous because you do not need to tweak it very often. Once you set it up, an audit once a quarter would suffice. Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate.

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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 impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."

"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."

"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

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

"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."

"The initial setup process is simple."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The most valuable features in Fortinet FortiWeb are sandboxing and threat prevention."

"The product is easy to configure."

"The solution is easy to configure and deploy."

"Built-in security templates, AV integrated, strong threat intelligence."

"I believe it is the best option on the market."

"Fortinet is a great SD-WAN player when it comes to security capabilities."

"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."

"The features of FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) that have proven most effective in protecting web applications include web filtering, DDoS protection, geo-location blocking, and blocking SQL injection attacks."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pros

"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."

"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."

"Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate."

Cons

"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."

"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."

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

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."

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

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The dashboards are not that configurable. Application-specific dashboards can be improved. If we have 50 applications, there should be something to see what's happening with these 50 applications. There could be a graph or a consolidated alert page where all alerts are inbuilt. They have other products that I can use, but this feature should be built into FortiWeb."

"Fine-tuning is a room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb."

"The stability is okay, sometimes. It could be more stable."

"There could be ADC offering as well."

"When we look at the incident reports in the dashboard, they are available for a maximum duration of 24 hours. They should provide more time for the analysis and increase the duration of the availability of these reports. Currently, it gives the options for 5 minutes, 1 hour, and 24 hours. It would be excellent if there are more options for a longer time period. It may be configurable, but I don't know how to do it."

"The documentation for the machine learning could be better. They do not provide proper documentation explaining how the solution works or how to configure it."

"If some of my customers want to migrate from F5 to Fortinet Firewall, or the Fortinet WAF solution, there are some migration issues since I cannot migrate all the elements quickly using Fortinet Firewall."

"Centralized management of multiple devices, and GUI improvement, could reduce the learning curve."

More Fortinet FortiWeb cons

"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."

"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."

"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."

"The UI is not very intuitive and could be better."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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"

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

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

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

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

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"The solution is expensive."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The licensing cost of the product is pretty high compared to other OEMs in the market."

"FortiWeb Web Application Firewall is not expensive."

"The cost isn't expensive."

"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb is reasonable. This is one of the key factors of why we use this solution."

"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb is expensive in our Ethiopian currency."

"If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the product price as three or four."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."

"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."

"The product has an affordable cost."

See which vendors are best for you

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884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

13%

Retailer

11%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software 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	60
Midsize Enterprise	27
Large Enterprise	36

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.

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 do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?

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

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

The pricing for Fortinet FortiWeb varies with different models having different prices. It depends on the requirement...

What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?

There is room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb. The team was only from FortiGate itself. They are making new firm...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?

The pricing is very competitive compared to other providers. The pricing is definitely a factor in our decision-makin...

What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?

We do use it, but the UI can be improved as we mostly work through the CI/CD. It provides support, but sometimes it i...

What is your primary use case for Signal Sciences?

The CDN is for caching and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is for protecting the servers from ma...

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Comparisons

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AWS WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 18% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 10% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiOS vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 5% of the time

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 4% of the time

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Sqreen vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 15% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 12% of the time

AWS WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Fortinet FortiWeb

Download Fortinet FortiWeb product report

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

February 2026

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) report

Download The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

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

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) provides web application and API protection, RASP, rate limiting, bot protection and DDoS purpose built to eliminate the challenges of legacy WAF.

Fastly

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

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

Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus

Fortinet FortiWeb vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)