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Cloudflare vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cloudflare

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/ACloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.

    $20

    per month

    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AF5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.N/A
    Pricing
    CloudflareF5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    Editions & Modules
    Pro
    $20
    per month
    Business
    $200
    per month
    Free
    Free
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CloudflareF5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    CloudflareF5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    Considered Both Products
    Cloudflare
    No answer on this topic
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    152 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    31 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    147 Answers
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    27 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    152 Answers
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    29 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    128 Answers
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    22 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    135 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    25 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    CloudflareF5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    Azure Application Gateway
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    NetScaler
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CloudflareF5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.2
    (173 ratings)
    9.0
    (21 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.2
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (8 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (141 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.6
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CloudflareF5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cloudflare
    Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    I mean the only reason we changed away from it was price and it just simply had to do with the licensing that Citrix was offering on the NetScalers. They had basically an all you can eat consumption license that we were easily inside of with all of our VDI usage, whereas with F5 we had to buy the hardware and we had to license the software. Any place you need to actually do traffic balancing at scale, it's a fantastic product. I couldn't recommend it highly enough. There's just some things that hardware SSL offload and hardware load balancing just simply can't be equal that I don't know if there's a better product on the market for that.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cloudflare
    • The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
    • Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
    • One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    • Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Cloudflare
    • In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
    • Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
    • While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    • Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Cloudflare
    lower cost
    Incentivized
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    F5
    F5 has always been one of the best products we have in the data center. We had few issues with the BUG and Code upgrades but the main use cases for F5 was always top notch. From High availability to Globally load balancing applications across multiple data centers and muti cloud environments.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Cloudflare
    Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very easy to use. Building each application is straightforward forward and the help function and now with the new AI assistant soon to be available, it is going to be easier than ever to be able to understand and implement each application.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cloudflare
    In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Cloudflare
    Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cloudflare
    Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    Good after sales support if one purchased direct support from F5.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Cloudflare
    Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    Easy to implement if one had attended F5 Training for Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cloudflare
    They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.
    They have very good reputation.
    They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    F5 is doing its specialized function. There is no other product that can beat them. We are extremely happy with the product. Especially on load balancing, traffic redirecting TLS encryption, and SNI modification. We will continue to explore F5's product, especially on the public cloud side. e.g. NGINX.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Cloudflare
    They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Cloudflare
    • Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
    • WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
    • CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
    • DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    • The F5 LTMs have had a very positive impact on our business objectives. Are websites are very heavily utilized with users all over the globe.
    • The F5 LTMs have provided a mechanism for making difficult applications work with our current infrastructure like MS teams.
    • The F5 LTMs are very good at customizing irules to deal with everyday issues.
    Incentivized
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