NGINX App Protect vs Wallarm NG WAF comparison

F5 and Wallarm are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.3, while Wallarm is ranked #39. F5 holds a 2.2% mindshare in WAF, compared to Wallarm’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% 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 Jan 1, 2025

Wallarm NG WAF and NGINX App Protect are key players in the web application security market. While Wallarm NG WAF excels in adaptive security features and automation, NGINX App Protect offers superior integration with NGINX environments, providing a strong security foundation.

Features: Wallarm NG WAF's valuable features include adaptive threat detection, machine learning for real-time adaptation, and the ability to operate in blocking mode effectively. NGINX App Protect offers comprehensive traffic management, security management features, and a command-line interface for simplicity.

Room for Improvement: Wallarm NG WAF could improve its interface and expand integration capabilities for diverse infrastructures. Enhancing support for complex environments and adding more detailed analytics would be beneficial. NGINX App Protect could streamline deployment for non-NGINX infrastructures. More intuitive configuration options and enhanced reporting features could also be areas for improvement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Wallarm NG WAF offers an easy deployment process with strong cloud-native support and responsive customer service. NGINX App Protect benefits from seamless integration with NGINX setups and a global support network, though it may be complex for users unfamiliar with NGINX.

Pricing and ROI: Wallarm NG WAF delivers a competitive pricing model demonstrating significant ROI through reduced threat mitigation expenses. NGINX App Protect, with potentially higher initial costs, offers extensive features justifying its pricing, providing a good ROI for securing extensive NGINX deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed NGINX App Protect vs. Wallarm NG WAF Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect vs. Wallarm NG WAF

May 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 June 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.5%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX App Protect is 2.2%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Wallarm NG WAF is 1.0%, up from 0.5% 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	4.5%
NGINX App Protect	2.2%
Wallarm NG WAF	1.0%
Other	92.3%

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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Valerio Guaglianone

Dev Ops Engineer at adesso AG

Long-term web protection has supported reliable traffic management but needs a simpler interface

NGINX App Protect is a good product. I have used both versions from F5 -also the free version- (I mean the NGINX/NGINX One/App Protect free trial period), and I think it is a good product. It's stable, affordable, and easy to manage. NGINX App Protect is a comprehensive security solution that combines advanced WAF, DoS protection, API security, and DevSecOps automation in a lightweight, scalable package ideal for modern cloud-native architectures. The adaptive machine learning capabilities are truly commendable, as the solution can establish traffic baselines and detect anomalies in real time. It automatically adjusts security policies, minimizing the need for manual intervention and reducing false positives. Additionally, it supports scalable deployment across diverse environments, including on-premises, cloud, Kubernetes, and containers, offering both flexibility and scalability I have experience with the web server, F5 load balancer, and similar products provided by Ergon, for eg. the web application firewall and the Microgateway for K8S. I'm also familiar with F5 BIG-IP products.

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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

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."

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

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

"For us, the key feature of Cloudflare is DDoS protection and IP hiding, especially since we are a crypto company."

"It protects web applications efficiently."

"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."

"There is a huge signature repository"

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"It has the best documentation features."

"WAF is useful to track mitigation, inclusion, prevention, and the parametric firewall."

"NGINX App Protect is stable."

"We have seen a return on investment using NGINX App Protect."

"I would recommend this solution to others because it performs well."

"NGINX App Protect has positively impacted my organization by adding an additional layer of security on top of my infrastructure layer, which I consider quite helpful."

"NGINX App Protect has improved the flexibility of services in our company and distributed new escalation applications."

"The tool's most valuable feature is the OWASP certification. Additionally, the tool's ability to enforce strong passwords and OTP within minutes is impressive. With its analytics and recommendations, it is a very good solution."

More NGINX App Protect pros

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"Vulnerability scanner and WAF are valuable features."

Cons

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

"Cloudflare should update the version of the ModSecurity core rule set that they run on."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

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

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

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

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

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time."

"NGINX App Protect would be improved with integration with Shape and F5 WAF, which would make it easy for users to manage all their web application security with a single solution."

"The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model is also not good."

"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."

"The solution needs to be improved in the e-commerce portal."

"The support from NGINX App Protect is too expensive."

"I think NGINX App Protect could be improved by having it come out of the box with NGINX."

"It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requirements and specifications to deploy the service, to avoid disruptions after implementation."

More NGINX App Protect cons

"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."

"It needs more customization in PDF reports."

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

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

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

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"The solution is expensive."

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

"It is not too pricey."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."

"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."

"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."

"The product's price is high."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"NGINX App Protect is expensive."

"There are no additional fees."

"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

"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%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

13%

Computer Software Company

Construction 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	9
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	13

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 NGINX App Protect?

I will not be able to answer about my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for NGINX App Protect, as so...

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What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

I did not face any issues with NGINX App Protect. The only issue that we had is that someone was trying to install th...

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What is your primary use case for NGINX App Protect?

I have been dealing with NGINX App Protect and the WAF policy. I usually recommend NGINX App Protect for banking and ...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

June 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

June 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2026

Download Wallarm NG WAF product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

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

NGINX App Protect offers comprehensive security features like auto-learning and bot protection. Its real-time threat detection and ease of integration make it suitable for web and mobile application security across on-premises, cloud, and container environments.

NGINX App Protect stands out with its adaptive machine learning, scalable deployment options, and robust API connectivity, offering Layer 7 DDoS protection and an OWASP-certified WAF. While it supports comprehensive traffic and security management, enhancements in platform integration, automation, and technical support could improve usability. The pricing model and policy management options could also see refinement. Commonly employed in securing web and mobile applications, it addresses threats including OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities and DDoS attacks, while providing seamless integration with Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines.

What are the key features of NGINX App Protect?

Auto-learning: Adapts to evolving threat landscapes.
Bot and Force Protection: Prevents unauthorized access efficiently.
Integration with DevOps: Streamlines security within CI/CD pipelines.
Adaptive Machine Learning: Continuously enhances threat recognition.
Scalable Deployment: Easily manages growing demand across environments.
Traffic and Security Management: Ensures secure data flow.
Command-line Interface: Offers efficient control and management.
OWASP Certification: Meets top industry security standards.
API Connectivity: Facilitates communication between components.
Layer 7 DDoS Protection: Safeguards against complex attacks.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Enhanced Security: Reliable protection against major vulnerabilities.
Effective Traffic Management: Balances load efficiently.
Ease of Implementation: Simple integration saves time and effort.
Operational Scalability: Supports growth across all environments.
Comprehensive Threat Detection: Real-time monitoring minimizes risks.
Flexible Policy Options: Tailors security measures to specific needs.

NGINX App Protect finds broader use in sectors like banking and telecommunications, where it secures high-performance digital infrastructures. Its application spans perimeter security, load balancing, and acts as a reverse proxy in environments necessitating stringent security, high throughput, and robust management. The tool's adaptability facilitates its deployment alongside containers, ensuring compatibility with contemporary development practices.

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

NGINX App Protect vs. Wallarm NG WAF

May 2026

Free Report: NGINX App Protect vs. Wallarm NG WAF

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