AWS WAF vs. Azure Application Gateway

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS WAF
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services offers AWS WAF (web application firewall) to protect web applications from malicious behavior that might impede the applications functioning and performance, with customizable rules to prevent known harmful behaviors and an API for creating and deploying web security rules.
$0.60
per 1 million requests
Azure Application Gateway
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall.N/A
Pricing
AWS WAFAzure Application Gateway
Editions & Modules
Resource Type - Request
$0.60
per 1 million requests
Resource Type - Rule
$1.00
per month (prorated hourly)
Resource Type - Web ACL
$5.00
per month (prorated hourly)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS WAFAzure Application Gateway
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
AWS WAFAzure Application Gateway
Considered Both Products
AWS WAF
Chose AWS WAF
When it comes to integration with AWS resources, we found that AWS WAF can easily integrate with CloudFront, API gateway, ALB, etc. When we analyzed other products, we found that the integration can be a little more difficult than just a click of a button. However, the pricing …
Chose AWS WAF
Easy of use. Setup and configuration is fairly quick. There are the usual advantages of it being a cloud solution where you can buy into the solution, configure it and set it up and get it up and running. If you are already a subscriber to AWS, having a native service has …
Chose AWS WAF
Comparatively, AWS WAF is far more prevalent in modern age web application as most of the High-Traffic E-commerce sites are moved on AWS. Due to this most developers are familiar with WAF, in addition its pretty easy comparatively as well. So other solutions may only come into …
Chose AWS WAF
There are a number of reasons to select AWS WAF. Most importantly, it easy to deploy. It helps programmers to protect against a wide range of vulnerabilities like injection attacks, DDoS, and many others from OWASP top 10. It allows us to set up rules and blocks any threats …
Chose AWS WAF
The integration with AWS services is pretty straight forward and provides a lot of functionalities other products don't. AWS Managed Rules can be used for easy setup with high protection options or Custom Rules can be created to costomize WAF to fit our needs.
Chose AWS WAF
Unlike these other AWS tools, WAF provides real-time traffic control, rules that can be customized according to the needs of the user, and is based on an implementation in the cloud which avoids the use of memory on computers as well as an account with a very affordable cost …
Chose AWS WAF
The use of this software was decided on because it is much easier to manage since the rules that are implemented can be specific or centralized. We also like it because you only pay for what you used.

Imperva SecureSphere requires a much higher learning curve.
Chose AWS WAF
We evaluated Imperva, but we were more convinced with AWS WAF because of the better pricing model, ease of deployment as we were already using the AWS platform which helping in ease of integration. The technical support for AWS WAF seemed to be better as they had better …
Azure Application Gateway
Chose Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway provides seamless integration with azure services and platforms like azure load balancer, azure monitor, also it offer advanced load balancing capabilities and build in WAF Functionality.
Chose Azure Application Gateway
Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and Azure Traffic Manager) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features. Azure Firewall, although it has security features, is more expensive, …
Chose Azure Application Gateway
I have my dependency application in Azure Application Gateway. I had to use this, and it has all the features we were looking for.
Chose Azure Application Gateway
HAProxy is an excellent load balancer that can also be used in cloud environments (and we do!), and is relied by hyper-large enterprises globally as well. However, HAProxy is a little bit more rudimentary in feature space, it does the core job well and securely, but doesn't …
Chose Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway gives you application-level routing and load-balancing services that let you build a scalable and highly-available web front end in Azure.
Best Alternatives
AWS WAFAzure Application Gateway
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.3 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.3 out of 10
NGINX
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Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS WAFAzure Application Gateway
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS WAFAzure Application Gateway
Likelihood to Recommend
AWS WAF is highly appropriate to interrupt or prevent cyber attacks because when implementing rules, whether they are specific or centralized, so any application that has these vulnerabilities is protected.
Implementing managed rules creates greater security to protect both API and applications. If implemented along with other AWS tools, the security is much better, so if you want to protect applications against more specific attacks, it is ideal to integrate with Amazon CloudFront, which is a great benefit because it warns when thresholds are exceeded or specific attacks occur. AWS WAF is ideal to avoid common web attacks. For more specific attacks and scenarios, I don't recommend this.
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The best practice for a cloud environment is to use the tools provided by the cloud provider. That's why for Azure cloud, Azure Application Gateway is the most cost-effective solution that you can use. You can use a single Azure Application Gateway instance for load balancing WAF, URL-based routing, and more.
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Pros
  • AWS WAF has the most developer-friendly API to create firewall rules.
  • AWS WAF provides OWASP security controls, which reduces developers' burden (i.e., SQL injection and cross-site scripting).
  • AWS WAF has customizable web security rules. The user can even push the rules through the API available, which is the great feature and helped me a lot.
  • It protects applications at layer 7 (HTTP) of the OSI model and not just layer 4 (TCP).
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  • Uploading images by multiple end-users from several applications like web, mobile, etc.
  • When there is a high volume of data requests, it helps to queue them based on the type of request. So it's easy to serve and reduce the loading time from the application layer.
  • An application gateway is useful when it can identify the type of details the user is requesting.
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Cons
  • The documentation offered is somewhat confusing, so it would be ideal if it were much more direct and precise.
  • Your initial configuration may be confusing, so the best option is to use the rule templates provided by AWS.
  • Its configuration is not unified with AWS, so it must be done separately and it takes some time.
  • The number of rules to be established is somewhat limited.
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  • More cost-effective pricing plans are welcome for the future, especially for WAF
  • Ability to automate the TLS certificate renewal procedure
  • Ability to manage non-HTTP traffic
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Likelihood to Renew
We have been using AWS WAF for the past 3 years in front of our websites. We find it useful in preventing data crawling, DDOS attacks, etc on our websites, and hence we are going to use it in the future as well. AWS WAF is one of the best Firewalls in business.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
The product is highly scalable. It is easy to configure the rules and thereby helps us to mitigate many vulnerabilities. The interface and programming of the firewall provisions were easy to setup. Amazon clearly spent a lot of time figuring this out and perfecting it. It allows users to do customized configurations based on their needs. It provides protection against a number of security issues like XSS, SQL injection, etc. I would definitely recommend this for protecting your infra as you scale, since this basically protects and filters all requests hitting your application server.
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Most of the Application Gateway's features and services can be managed and re-configured via either the Azure Portal GUI or via the Azure Cloud Shell, thus allowing both CLI modes, i.e. Azure CLI (Bash) and Azure Powershell. The v2 version of Application Gateway has significantly improved performance during initial configuration or during re-configuration changes, thus making it much more usable for IT admins, as compared to v1.
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Support Rating
If you're intending to use AWS WAF, I would say that you absolutely should sign up for support. AWS Support is excellent and they can help you in a really good way to solve your issues.
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I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.
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Alternatives Considered
Easy of use. Setup and configuration is fairly quick. There are the usual advantages of it being a cloud solution where you can buy into the solution, configure it and set it up and get it up and running. If you are already a subscriber to AWS, having a native service has its advantages.
Read full review
HAProxy is an excellent load balancer that can also be used in cloud environments (and we do!), and is relied by hyper-large enterprises globally as well. However, HAProxy is a little bit more rudimentary in feature space, it does the core job well and securely, but doesn't provide any fancy additional features. Also, it takes more effort to deploy HAProxy than simply using an in-built feature in the Azure stack.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Somewhat costly if specific needs are not there.
  • If security is concerned than comparatively is beneficial.
  • All those price that spent on AWS WAF in return gets saved in man hours.
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  • We are using Azure Application Gateway as the load balancing tool for our applications deployed on Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) clusters.
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ScreenShots