We use the solution for load balancing and web application firewall (WAF) balancing. We operate in a data center and use it for web application security and services.

The solution provides strong web security, particularly against web attacks, and has effective bot detection that helps reduce bot attacks.

Web attack signatures are very important for detecting web attacks. The bot detection feature is also crucial in reducing bot attacks.

The product could be more user-friendly, particularly the user interface for administrators. Additionally, configuration can be quite complex and needs improvement to be less complex.

I've been using it for almost three years.

The product is very stable. From one to ten, I would rate its stability at a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. We use it for multiple customers and data centers, and I would rate its scalability as nine.

The customer service is good. That siad, sometimes it takes too long to reach the right person. I would rate their effectiveness as an eight.

Positive

I am familiar with Citrix NetScaler and F5.

The initial setup was not too challenging. Post-initial configurations can be complex.

Two to three engineers are typically involved in maintenance operations.

I don't know the exact pricing. It is not the cheapest yet not the most expensive. It depends on needs, budget, and vision.

I have experience with Citrix solutions.

I recommend this product to others.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our clients mostly have their own applications, such as banking apps, and use F5 Advanced WAF to avoid vulnerabilities and threats on both the application layer and transport layer. 

We create web policies for their apps and configure ASM signatures to prevent vulnerabilities. After configuring the policies, I monitor logs continuously to block vulnerability attacks and assist clients in addressing any issues.

One of the things that surprised me the most about F5 devices is their compatibility with the existing infrastructure of most customers. They can be easily integrated between the main firewall and back end servers, making it a seamless addition to enhance security.

The traffic learning feature stands out as the most valuable. When an app is accessed, the log generated in F5 Advanced WAF provides suggestions on what actions to take. This feature is particularly beneficial in new vulnerability scenarios, offering guidance based on learned data. 

Additionally, I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode. The solution learns from logs, and based on that learning, I configure ASM signatures.

The GUI interface can be confusing due to similar-looking tabs for policy building, traffic learning, and event logs. A more explanatory GUI would be beneficial. However, F5 solutions are a bit expensive compared to others, although they provide the best service and options.

I have been working with F5 Advanced WAF for around six months.

The solution is very stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

F5 Advanced WAF is very scalable, and I would rate its scalability as nine out of ten.

F5 support is excellent and deserves a ten out of ten. Their technical support is responsive and helpful, making the overall experience very satisfactory.

Positive

I have not worked with many other vendors as extensively as F5, but I have some knowledge of FortiWAF. FortiWAF has fewer options compared to F5, particularly in features like iRULES, which offers more flexibility for traffic management and coding.

The initial setup is not very lengthy. Once the device is on-premises, configuring and managing it is quite efficient, though the entire project from start to end may take about a month to a month and a half.

I work with a team of five to six network engineers across different cities, providing support and collaboration for client deployments.

The return on investment is quite high with F5 solutions. Customers prefer F5 for their superior service and features, despite the higher cost.

F5 is on the expensive side but offers superior solutions and options. Customers are willing to pay for the quality and features provided.

I have some knowledge of FortiWAF, but F5 provides more options, especially with features like iRULES for managing traffic.

I would recommend F5 Advanced WAF to other users. It provides excellent features, flexibility, and support.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use F5 Advanced WAF to restrict attacks on our remote access VPN. We've implemented geolocations. Our APIs are exposed over the Internet, so we've utilized F5 Advanced WAF to protect those APIs, and it's integrated with our other applications.

The WAF solution works perfectly fine. If we face any issues, we get hotfixes from the solution experts. It is a little bit difficult to engage with a solution expert firsthand, but once they're engaged, they do whatever is best to resolve the issue.

We faced a lot of outside attacks on our VPNs and APIs, so the geolocation feature works perfectly fine for us. We use iRules as well. Our internal access VPN is advertised from a Cisco firewall, and above that, we have an F5 LTM. We have written some iRules on it to minimize the effects of attacks.

We are a PCI DSS-compliant organization, and we have a lot of security balance to improve our infrastructure. So we use this software to meet those requirements. It works well. So, F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

It's pretty smooth. Whichever load we put on it, we've observed minimal chances of the WAF exploiting the memory or sessions hanging. 

The bot protection aspect works perfectly fine. All the solutions and features are renewed and they're working well. I don't see anything that can be improved.

We also leveraged AI initiatives. 

Support is a little slow, but the solution itself is great. If I compare F5 and Fortinet, the main issue is the support. With Fortinet, it takes less time to engage a support engineer and get things sorted compared to F5.

I have been using F5 Advanced WAF since last January.

I work for a US-based firm, and the project I deal with relies heavily on F5 and F5 LTMs.

I work on both F5 BIG-IP cloud and on-premises and F5 LTM.

It is a stable product. 

The physical hardware is not as scalable. We have to decide which version is best for us to procure because it is a costly device. So we try our best to get all the juice out of one box.

There's around 2500 users getting services from the F5. In my team, we are twelve engineers who are managing the infrastructure.

Support is a little slow, but the solution itself is great. If I compare F5 and Fortinet, the main issue is the support. With Fortinet, it takes less time to engage a support engineer and get things sorted compared to F5.

I'll give F5 a five because it is difficult to engage an engineer and get the issue sorted. For Fortinet, I'd give them a nine.

Neutral

The initial setup process of the F5 WAF product is straightforward. There isn't an issue in setting up from scratch. We use F5 with the cloud as well, especially in Azure and AWS.

The deployment took around half an hour for an engineer to get the basic infrastructure done.

It is not difficult to manage bug fixes, upgrades, and everything. It doesn't take much time. The dashboards are good. All the basic information is given to us on the first page, and it's easy to manage.

It brings a return on investment.

It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required.

I would recommend F5 Advanced WAF to other users looking to implement it.

My advice:

A lot of organizations are financially constrained when buying devices. So if the organization is capable of maintaining and managing a device like F5, we suggest F5. Otherwise, we suggest other solutions, like Fortinet or Citrix.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten because of the support.

We use the solution for load balancing.

They should improve the capability, and then they should work on the virtualization of NGINX. Currently, most environments are virtualized. F5 Advanced WAF will not be able to protect it.

I have been using F5 Advanced WAF as a reseller for 5 years.

Technical support is good but not enough. It takes a lot of time to get support.

Neutral

The initial setup is not so easy nor not so complex. There is a learning phase, and there are policies to apply. It complies with regulations. Recently, we used it for Formula One, and it proved very effective.

ROI is covered in one year. You can see how it protects and mitigates damages in the network.

The product is not so expensive. It depends on the assets.

There are other solutions for data loss prevention, such as Symantec and IP solutions. There are options available for DNS blocking. While these solutions may specialize in certain aspects, They offer comprehensive coverage across various areas. Each vendor specializes in different aspects, but F5 Advanced WAF excels in its particular domain.

I recommend the solution. Most of the environment is going to virtualization.

Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

Our company uses two versions of F5 Advanced WAF. The solution is used to protect against web hacking bots. 

F5 Advanced WAF has improved our organization's security posture by fending off all types of attacks. The solution has been successful in mitigating not just one kind of attack but also rare attacks that disturb the OS and try to achieve a denial of service. The solution has saved our company from performance deterioration and also enhanced security.   

The solution's most valuable features include application DDoS protection, bot blocking, and HTTP header verifications. The solution protects against seven types of DDoS attacks. 

More legacy protocols should be added to the solution. The aforementioned protocols are generally less used and might have been phased out from multiple solutions. But some of the large corporations that are clients of our company are unwilling to let go of applications that have been developed.

The aforementioned clients believe that as some of the new websites do not use these technologies, it wouldn't be ideal to replace the existing applications; for example, a bank with millions of dollars connected to a software wouldn't be willing to replace it instantly.

It often takes years for enterprise-level businesses to replace applications. The vendor of F5 Advanced WAF needs to consider that even if legacy protocols are not necessarily used for new projects, existing or prior applications projects rely heavily on them, and such protocols need to be protected until they are completely phased out of the market.

The vendor needs to provide complete support for the legacy protocols, just like the latest protocols in the market, until they are assured that none of the customers are using them. 

I would like to witness the expansion of the supported protocols set by the solution. The tool should be promoted as an advanced protection solution that supports all types of protocols. In future versions, some protocols offered by the solution need to be more specialized. All public-facing protocols should be added to F5 Advanced WAF. 

I have been using F5 Advanced WAF since 2018. 

If the solution is setup by professional services, then it will exhibit outstanding stability, otherwise there might be issues. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. The solution is highly scalable and accommodating. The solution also allows troubleshooting due to its scaling capacity. The backend system of the solution allows the accommodation of solutions that one can pickup. 

In our company, there are about ten users of F5 Advanced WAF, and it's being used daily. Our organization also plans to increase the usage and the number of users for the solution. The tool's performance has benefitted application delivery in our organization. 

I would rate the tech support a seven out of ten. The tech support quality is slightly above average. The support team's first responders to raise tickets are not skilled engineers.

Large enterprises usually expect their issues to be resolved within a few minutes, so in a support process where first responders collect information and if they are unable to tackle it, the issue gets escalated, which overall becomes a huge, time-consuming process. The vendor should provide highly skilled first responders to large clients of F5 Advanced WAF, as for each second the solution is down, the clients might be losing money. 

Neutral

Before F5 Advanced WAF, our organization used IPS and Fortinet. Fortinet could only handle simple tasks, and F5 Advanced WAF is better for specialized application protection and scalability. Fortinet has a quick and easy setup process that doesn't require highly skilled engineers, making it suitable for resource management. 

I would rate the initial setup a seven out of ten. F5 Advanced WAF offers an easy setup process. Our company works with both the cloud and on-premise versions of the product. The solution's deployment, including the configuration, can takefour to five days. One engineer is enough to deploy F5 Advanced WAF for a single system.

The frequency of maintenance depends upon the setup of the solution; in case of faulty setup, the administration overhead will be greater due to repeated maintenance needs to fix issues. Often, customers invest in professional services to setup F5 Advanced WAF, following which an engineer can implement the maintenance. If professional services are not availed to setup the solution, it can take up to a month. 

The solution provides an ROI. When professional services install it, it has low administrative overhead and increases performance due to its scaling capacity. The solution can be used with any specific client or application as it allows user programming to be open-source. With F5 Advanced WAF, our company is able to adapt to the versatile requirements of clients. I would rate the ROI of the solution a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten. Sometimes, for specific models, additional licenses over the standard one need to be purchased. F5 Advanced WAF doesn't offer a single license that fits all use cases; the user needs to choose the license format. A structured license is usually preferred for F5 Advanced WAF. 

Our company also evaluated Palo Alto products, but F5 Advanced WAF offered superior scalability. 

The solution mainly provides automated responses; once the solution is set up and trained properly, it requires minimal intervention. As the solution is completely automated our company team has to only check the reports. 

But there is an elaborate setup process where, as part of our company, we deploy applications in an environment, implement work policies, and use automated software to simulate multi-vendor attacks and web hacking to test the solution's ability to detect attacks and, accordingly, we make adjustments to the flexible solution. 

After the simulation testing, the policy implemented for the solution is put in a station period where it won't be flexible initially, and then reporting is implemented, which will escalate to the anticipated restriction level soon. 

After the policies' staging period, when the solution has completed learning through simulations and our company feels confident with the test product in the active environment, the solution becomes automated from that point, and manual intervention is not necessary. A highly skilled team is needed for the abovementioned solution training process. 

Our company develops multiple applications internally as our work sites are not ready, and varying results are expected from different work sites, webpages, or newly added features. When a new feature is added to the solution, we revert back to the deployment process to test it. Our company needs to ensure that the in-house developed features that are integrated into the solution are not prone to attacks through simulation testing every time.

Our company feels confident when the solution's policies are developed through the staging, simulation and rule enforcement process. The aforementioned process helps with reports and also with performance. In our company, we have also encountered websites that didn't function well with the solution; even though the websites were functioning properly, the performance deteriorated slowly. Many attackers nowadays venture beyond the threshold, which might be difficult to capture.

If we consider any service or web applications over the internet that is attacked beyond the threshold, it wouldn't be a blind attack for the application owners as it would get blocked immediately, but instead, they progress slowly with the attack and ramp up once they can change the IP addresses and identify a suitable angle of attack, until these attacks get blocked they can affect your service.

Sometimes, a few of our organization's clients complain about the solution working slowly, even without apparent attacks. For example, if you're a trader, the website might function well enough most of the time, but sometimes you have to buy or sell within minutes, whereas if it doesn't work, you need to visit a different website, which can also be the goal of attackers. 

F5 Advanced WAF also allows you to write your own code for the interface.  F5 Advanced WAF specializes in behavior identification, which helps in superior attack mitigation. I would advise others to get the solution setup only by specialized or professional services. I would rate F5 Advanced WAF a nine out of ten. 

Primarily, the Advanced WAF sits behind our network perimeter. It centralizes traffic flow to our network, filters requests, and identifies any potential threats.

It helps us detect threats or malicious requests coming into the network, protecting it from being hacked. It helps guard against issues like cross-site scripting (XSS) and other similar threats.

So, F5 Advanced WAF helped mitigate bot traffic for our web applications.

Moreover, my experience is that it's pretty straightforward to use. Our firewall team handles requests through a change management tool within scheduled change windows. However, F5 is our only firewall solution.

It's a valuable tool to protect web servers exposed to the external network. With numerous web applications running on Apache or IIS servers, the F5 Advanced WAF's threat detection capabilities protect the network before traffic reaches those servers.

It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the rules per the requirements. 

The self-service aspect could be improved. 

The user interface (UI) also seems a bit outdated. Making it more user-friendly would be beneficial.

We've been using it for approximately five to six years.

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. It is a stable product. 

It is pretty good. I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten.

Ssometimes, the way our enterprise handles change requests might slow things down because of the internal rules and processes. But these changes, once approved, do take effect immediately on the firewall itself. 

We have a change window twice a week for these requests. I don't think the limitation is with the firewall itself; it's more about our internal procedures.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten because I have seen that not too much customization is required during setup. The change requests we submit are usually clear and easily applied. 

Overall, the policies work well, and the threat detection is good. It catches deviations and anomalies effectively.

From a recommendation standpoint, it's a fairly easy tool to use. However, you definitely need some knowledge about scripting, OWASP fundamentals, threat detection, and general cybersecurity principles to get the most out of it.

We use the solution to secure web applications running in the organization.

F5 is one of the best products. We use it for multiple segments within our organization and applications. It is a central point of all the applications being scrubbed and checked.

The customer service could be improved.

I have been using F5 Advanced WAF for more than ten years.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

Our entire organization and clients use the solution.

The initial setup is easy since I have used the technology for almost 20 years. Some applications require more attention depending on what you are doing and trying to achieve with the particular module. You need some assistance from the team in configuring the different components within the application through the web.

The solution is worth the money that you spend.

The solution is expensive.

Whatever you are looking for can be done on the platform. Some features may not be available with IO components. A few features give you the flexibility that no other product can.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the product for load-balancing purposes.

The product has valuable features for load balancing, monitoring tools, and HPXpress services.

They could provide better pricing.

We have been using F5 Advanced WAF for a year.

I rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

The product is highly scalable. It is suitable for enterprise businesses. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

I rate the initial setup process a seven out of ten.

I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten.

I rate F5 Advanced WAF an eight out of ten.

My clients often seek a comprehensive security solution for their hybrid environments, with both cloud and on-premise web applications. To address this, I recommend combining F5 Advanced WAF for web application security with Fortinet solutions, including FortiGate, FortiSign, and FortiAnalyzer, for broader network security aspects like vulnerability ranking, patch management, and remediation. I focus on FortiGate and FortiAnalyzer, collaborating with a colleague who manages firewall setup, ensuring a robust and unified security approach for our clients.

F5's user-friendly interface and seamless integration stand out as the most valuable features for us. The intuitive interface streamlines tasks, providing a straightforward experience. F5's adaptability in diverse environments sets it apart, especially when compared to alternatives like FortiGate. Despite being pricier, the ease of integration and user-friendly design make F5 Advanced WAF our preferred choice for securing web applications. F5's commitment to customer engagement, exemplified by hosting a certification event in Nigeria, further shows its support and involvement in our region.

One area for improvement in the product is its SSO integration, which posed challenges and required significant effort to resolve. The complexity of SSO deployment, coupled with high associated costs, could be addressed to enhance usability. Streamlining the SSO process and revisiting cost considerations would contribute to an improved user experience.

I have been working with F5 Advanced WAF for three years.

I would rate the stability as a nine out of ten.

I would give the scalability of the solution an eight out of ten. It is quite scalable and performs well. I would recommend F5 Advanced WAF for medium-sized businesses and enterprises, primarily due to considerations around cost and sustainability. The solution is well-suited for companies of this size, ensuring that not only is it deployed effectively, but it can also be sustained over time to meet ongoing security needs.

The technical support is good. I would rate it as a seven out of ten.

Neutral

For an end-to-end solution, Fortinet stands out over F5 Advanced WAF. Fortinet's comprehensive product suite, including FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, and integrated features like CMDD, provides a more seamless and holistic approach to security. While F5 is strong in certain areas, the integrated capabilities of Fortinet make it my preferred choice for a comprehensive security solution.

The initial setup for F5 Advanced WAF is user-friendly and relatively straightforward.

The main drawback of F5 is the cost, which can be a challenge. 

Overall, I would rate F5 Advanced WAF as a nine out of ten.

We use F5 Advanced WAF to protect web applications on HTTPS, APIs, and portals.

F5 Advanced WAF helps our engineers to learn the complete configuration, including fundamental and advanced policies.

Most customers encounter stability issues with the product's Big-IP logs. It works slowly while retrieving logs.

We have been using F5 Advanced WAF since this year.

The product is more stable than Fortinet.

The product has modular appliances. It works well, scalability-wise.

The technical support services are good. The team includes professional engineers to communicate with the customers regarding cases.

It is easy to set up F5 Advanced WAF. Although, it is difficult to deploy and maintain compared to Fortinet. The deployment process involves gathering customer information regarding virtual servers to be protected. Later, we select the best design suitable for their requirements and start with license provisioning. Further, we configure LTM with special servers and nodes and proceed with configuring the security policy and advanced directory. It takes a week to protect the infrastructure fully. Once we have license provisioning, it is good to run.

F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high. Fortinet and some other vendors are more affordable.

F5 Advanced WAF has good capabilities, powerful tools, and professional services. I advise others to compare pricing with vendors in terms of their use cases before purchasing the product.

I rate it a ten out of ten.