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F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) vs. NGINX

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AF5 Distributed Cloud WAF leverages F5's Advanced WAF technology, delivering WAF-as-a-Service and combining signature- and behavior-based protection for web applications. It acts as an intermediate proxy to inspect application requests and responses to block and mitigate a broad spectrum of risks stemming from the OW ASP Top 10, persistent and coordinated threat campaigns, bots, and layer 7 DoS.N/A

    NGINX

    Score9.2 out of 10
    Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
    NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
    Pricing
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
    Considered Both Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    129 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    30 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    113 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    26 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    126 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    30 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    95 Answers
    90%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    18 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    104 Answers
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    26 Answers
    Features
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
    Application Servers
    Comparison of Application Servers features of F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) and NGINX
    Feature
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
    -
    Ratings
    NGINX
    7.8
    21 Ratings
    2% below category average
    IDE support00 Ratings7.210 Ratings
    Security management00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
    Administration and management00 Ratings7.018 Ratings
    Application server performance00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
    Installation00 Ratings9.718 Ratings
    Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings7.016 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Oracle WebLogic Server
    Score7.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Akamai App & API Protector
    Score8 out of 10
    Red Hat JBoss EAP
    Score7.3 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.9
    (71 ratings)
    8.8
    (48 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.1
    (4 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)NGINX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    F5
    It helps our website to manage well during high traffic seasons and Holidays. This plaform manages the website overall performance and also protect it against DDoS attacks during these High demand period. It also protects transactions done on our website for the booking of services and products buying by our customers and keep their data safe.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    [NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    F5
    • Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
    • I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
    • F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
    • We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
    • Great at serving static content.
    • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
    • Open-Source (no cost)!
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    F5
    • Better integration between different F5 solutions
    • Fail over between devices feels unstable if there are thousands of objects attached to the traffic-group. Needs to be more simpler.
    • We have seen issues with malicious user detection where we have used open protocols due to legacy applications, and have been caught with legitimate traffic being blocked.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
    • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
    • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
    • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
    • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
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    Likelihood to Renew
    F5
    We gave it an 8 because it protects our web apps well and is reliable. The WAF is flexible and meets most of our needs. It could improve in user interface and make integrations easier, but overall, it’s a solid and effective security tool for us.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    Great value for the product
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    F5
    I believe is a solution that was designed from the start to be simple and easy to use. Coming from Imperva, it simply eased the burden and complexity of managing and securing our apps on different environments (cloud and on-prem). It easy to scale and very quick to deploy (as a cloud waf should be), provide us with DevOps integrations, visibility and automatic insights from multiple events that guarantee peace of mind for us analysts and opp managers.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    F5
    Seems no issue
    Incentivized
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    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    F5
    Unnoticed slowness
    Incentivized
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    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    F5
    I never contacted support for this product.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    F5
    Online training saves me lots of time
    Incentivized
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    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    F5
    Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    F5
    It provides fewer false positives and a more granular approach to eliminating them, allowing us to focus on threats. Also, with the need to secure both on-premise and cloud-based web applications, we can only use Azure on the cloud part, but we still need to cover on-premise apps with WAF, so we would need to double the time to deploy and manage. Also, its flexibility of deployment scenarios offers us a faster time to deploy WAF without adjusting the app delivery process to WAF's existence.
    Incentivized
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    F5
    We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
    • we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
    • we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
    • individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    F5
    Dont see any issue so far
    Incentivized
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    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    F5
    • The biggest gain for us was speed. Before F5 Distributed Cloud WAF, onboarding a new app to our WAF stack meant manual rule tuning, traffic sampling and regression testing. Right now, we spin up a service, tag it with the right policy and its ready (production ready) within hours
    Incentivized
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    F5
    • Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
    • Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
    • Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshot

    NGINX Screenshots

    Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration