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F5 Advanced WAF pros and cons

Vendor: F5

4.2 out of 5

73 reviews
98% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

F5 Advanced WAF offers features like AI-driven protection, comprehensive application security, and advanced customization, excelling in compliance and load balancing. It includes DDoS mitigation, anti-bot measures, and PCI DSS compliance. However, challenges include scalability, cloud solutions, bot and API protection, stability issues, expensive licensing, and SSO integration difficulties. Tech support availability also needs enhancement, impacting its effectiveness for enterprise use.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features include artificial intelligence for extra protection, and it excels in monitoring and security compared to competitors.

It offers comprehensive application protection with advanced security features like anti-bot and signature updates, making it an enterprise-class firewall with load-balancing capabilities.

It provides robust DDoS mitigation and SSL uploading capabilities, combined with anomaly detection and enhanced customization options for traffic distribution.

F5 Advanced WAF stands out for its ability to fulfill compliance and regulatory requirements, offering features like PCI DSS checks and effective configurations to align with organizational needs.

The level of configurability and customization available, coupled with its impressive security capabilities, makes F5 Advanced WAF a top choice for protecting web applications from various threats.

CONS

F5 Advanced WAF needs to improve scalability and cloud-based solutions.

An improvement in bot protection and API protection is required.

There are issues with stability and false positives.

Licensing is expensive and could be more flexible.

Customers experience challenges with SSO integration and technical support availability.

F5 Advanced WAF Pros review quotes

Security Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

Jul 4, 2019

The most valuable feature is artificial intelligence and to get extra internal access.

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RT

Senior Network Engineer at PECCO

Jun 26, 2019

The initial setup was was easy to install.

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GS

Security Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 26, 2019

I like them because I like the security solution. They get extra marks compared to other solutions or competitors. There are more features than any other product I can think of. They're always monitoring, and the security features offer more than other, lesser products.

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F5 Advanced WAF

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about F5 Advanced WAF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2026.

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Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jun 26, 2019

With F5 Advanced WAF, it was protection for online publications and for our customers that caused us to choose the platform.

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Cyber & Security Application Delivery Expert at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Jun 27, 2019

The best solution for WAF.

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reviewer1046964

IT Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Sep 2, 2019

I definitely recommend this solution because of the time you save on analysis.

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Head IT Infrasrtucture at ActivEdge

Sep 5, 2019

The solution isn't too expensive. The license allows you to license what you need and leave out what you don't need.

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GD

Works at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Sep 19, 2019

This solution inspects your traffic and based on that, automatically create distinct qualities for you, so you can add this to the policy already created. That's what I like most.

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Cyber & Security Application Delivery Expert at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sep 23, 2019

The anti-bot protection is the solution's most valuable feature. Safe-guard or credential staffing are also useful features.

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reviewer1139526

Technical Team Leader at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Sep 24, 2019

This solution is an enterprise-class firewall that provides both load-balancing and security.

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F5 Advanced WAF Cons review quotes

Security Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

Jul 4, 2019

The administrator's user interface and some of the settings can sometimes be very complicated to understand.

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RT

Senior Network Engineer at PECCO

Jun 26, 2019

People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux

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GS

Security Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 26, 2019

You have to buy another module with an extra license, to have the authentication feature.

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F5 Advanced WAF

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about F5 Advanced WAF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2026.

881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jun 26, 2019

F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards.

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Cyber & Security Application Delivery Expert at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Jun 27, 2019

I think the deployment templates can be better.

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reviewer1046964

IT Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Sep 2, 2019

One thing that can be improved, is to increase the quantity over predefine policy.

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Head IT Infrasrtucture at ActivEdge

Sep 5, 2019

The solution is tedious. It takes a lot of discrete settings so one needs to get detailed and granular when they use the solution. It takes you a whole lot of energy and concentration to configure. It needs to be much more straight-forward, like other web solutions.

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GD

Works at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Sep 19, 2019

I would not expect traffic details to pass through the web application firewall across the length of the whole application. I think that there is a web application where it can let the application function without traffic going in into the WAF.

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Cyber & Security Application Delivery Expert at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sep 23, 2019

The solution's dashboard could be improved. When you're moving from policy to policy, the logs and the integration of the logs in other systems aren't straightforward.

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reviewer1139526

Technical Team Leader at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Sep 24, 2019

This solution can be made more user-friendly.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 70)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs F5 Advanced WAF

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Advanced WAF

Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Azure Front Door vs F5 Advanced WAF

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

NetScaler vs F5 Advanced WAF

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline vs F5 Advanced WAF

Akamai App and API Protector vs F5 Advanced WAF

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Advanced WAF

Azure Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Radware Alteon vs F5 Advanced WAF

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