Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. F5 BIG-IP

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Barracuda Web Application Firewall
Score 5.2 out of 10
N/A
Barracuda Web Application Firewall, from Barracuda Networks in Campbell, California, protects web applications from bots, DDoS attacks, and other advanced threats to enterprise apps.N/A
F5 BIG-IP
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
F5 BIG-IP software from Seattle-based F5 Networks is a load balancing and application protection solution suite available on cloud or via virtual editions, on a subscription or perpetual licensing basis.N/A
Pricing
Barracuda Web Application FirewallF5 BIG-IP
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Barracuda Web Application FirewallF5 BIG-IP
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Barracuda Web Application FirewallF5 BIG-IP
Best Alternatives
Barracuda Web Application FirewallF5 BIG-IP
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.3 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.3 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Barracuda Web Application FirewallF5 BIG-IP
Likelihood to Recommend
7.3
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
5.2
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Barracuda Web Application FirewallF5 BIG-IP
Likelihood to Recommend
Easy to use and reliable, with very little maintenance required and zero downtime to date. For the education sector, ease of use is hugely important as IT Managers/Technicians are often "Jack of all trades" with a good, broad general knowledge but perhaps lacking specific expertise in certain aspects. Being provided with easy-to-follow tutorials and instructions has been very useful in setting up and configuring the firewall, especially as my background is more in desktop support.
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Definitely in larger environments, more mature organizations that obviously have the budget to spend and want best in class. Where it struggles is those organizations that don't have the funding and money to spend on it and need more basic functionality. So I'd say that's smaller customers we've worked with and kind of mid-market. They tend to get scared when they get the quotes. Also we've had some struggles with account team consistency. So for the sales team, just a lot of turnover and a lot of missteps on customer calls.
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Pros
  • Attack patterns are regularly updates through contents via Barracuda Web Application Firewall update servers
  • Bot Protection has a good line feature to verify between the genuine clients like browsers and bots
  • Dos Protection also good level of protection to mitigate Layer 7 attacks
  • Allow Deny Rules provides a lot of granular controls to allow and deny the traffic
  • URL profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
  • Parameter profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
  • Risk score feature for the clients to mitigate attacks is also very good feature
  • Client fingerprint module can be used against malicious user to enhance security
  • Separate XML and JSOn profile for all the URL profiles of the application is plus
  • API security is very much effective and shadow API can also be identified
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  • The great thing is the IP address management that's happening. When you set up the network it's very easy and you don't have to keep on configuring everything together. Again, it's very streamlined and it's one of the biggest players there in the market for this work.
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Cons
  • STM crashes sometimes happen due to unusual traffic pattern
  • Obfuscation on the client side user credentials which appears in the developer tools of browser
  • URL Profiles redundancy during the learning of traffic needs to be fixed
  • Dos Protection should be more granular like escalation period to throw JS challenge, Captcha and rate limit when escalation period hits until the WAF stops the attack
  • Client Fingerprinting should work as expected when verifying the clients as in rare some scenarios, it creates issues
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  • Well, not necessarily the features. I find that we have to change our processes in order to kind of match what F5 BIG-IP does. And it's not a bad thing, it's just that a lot of my engineers want to do it their way, not they F5 BIG-IP way.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We have been using F5 for the last 25 years and there is no way we will leave F5 for any other load balancers.
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Usability
-User friendly interface for quick learning -Quick deployment for deploying applications -Easy to manage for naive -System components and upgradation of the WAF is very easy go with -Back restoration is very to make it up and ready anytime -Seperate JSON and XmL profiles for each URLs of the application is plus -Amazing and world class support engineer in comparison other vendors and always available to support -Quick resolution on bugs with their patch applying process
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It's not difficult to understand the parts of application configurations and features. Setting up new virtual servers with multiple profiles, certificates, and nodes is easy for new users through the web interface, which also translates to programability in scripts, DevOps, or other configuration management use-cases. Users from different backgrounds such as networking and infrastructure can use F5 BIG-IP, while users who are familiar with API calls can easily configure objects without needing to understand the platform at all.
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Support Rating
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is easy to use. Support from Barracuda is great also. Load Balancing of the Web Application Firewall is also nice. This allows you to do maintenance or have large loads for the end-user. Threat monitoring of our network and traffic coming into our services within our cloud solution.
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On the occasions when we've had to engage f5 support, they have been great. They have always resolved our issues quickly and been easy to work with and professional. The reason I give them a 10 out of 10, however, is because when we've had issues that have crossed over between the f5 BIG-IP, our Cisco switches, and our Microsoft IIS server the f5 support representatives have been extremely knowledgeable about every product and device involved and have been able to troubleshoot end-to-end without having to engage other vendors.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
Practical cases and hands on , many hours of training with tipical cases
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
implementation is fine
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Alternatives Considered
We have been using their Backup products especially Backup Appliances and legacy products like Intronis. We are also using their Cloud Backup Solutions for O365. This is the reason we opted for this product.
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We are recently not evaluating, but we have started the deployment for WAF and we're using GTM, LTM, you name it. F5, we are using all of them.
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Return on Investment
  • Easy for our IT team to use.
  • We just ran it as a pilot for a few months but it was the cheapest solution at the time.
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  • I would say from a security perspective, because I manage security, availability is sort of the key area for us and making sure that is properly handled through BIG-IP, that is the biggest business success, I would say from the product perspective.
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ScreenShots

Barracuda Web Application Firewall Screenshots

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