Leaders

High Performers

Contenders

Niche

Market Presence

Satisfaction

See Reviews

G2 Grid® Scoring

Web Application Firewalls (WAF) Definition

Web application firewalls (WAF) are designed to protect web applications by filtering and monitoring incoming traffic. These tools analyze the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) traffic as it comes in, identifying traffic anomalies and blocking potentially malicious traffic.

Companies use these tools in conjunction with additional application security software to protect operational web applications better. These tools differ from traditional firewall software, which controls traffic between servers by filtering traffic and content attempting to access a specific web-based application.

To qualify for inclusion in the Web Application Firewalls (WAF) category, a product must:

• Inspect traffic flow at the application level
• Filter HTTP traffic for web-based applications
• Block attacks such as SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS)

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Grid® Scoring Description

• Products in the Leader quadrant are rated highly by G2 users and have substantial Market Presence scores. Leaders include: Cloudflare Application Security and Performance, Radware Cloud WAF, Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF), HAProxy, and Fastly's Web Application and API Security
• High Performing products have high customer Satisfaction scores and low Market Presence compared to the rest of the category. High Performers include: Azion, TR7 ASP, F5 NGINX, Link11, AppTrana, and Prophaze
• Contender products have relatively low customer Satisfaction scores and high Market Presence compared to the rest of the category. While they may have positive reviews, they do not have enough reviews to validate those ratings. Contenders include: FortiAppSec Cloud, AWS WAF, Azure Application Gateway, Azure Web Application Firewall, Google Cloud Armor, and Sucuri
• Niche products have relatively low Satisfaction scores and low Market Presence compared to the rest of the category. While they may have positive reviews, they do not have enough reviews to validate those ratings. Niche products include: Barracuda Web Application Firewall, F5 BIG-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall (Advanced WAF), Wallarm API Security Platform, Broadcom Edge Secure Web Gateway, Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF), ModSecurity, Webscale, NetScaler, and Cloudbric