12 Best Web Application Firewalls IN 2023 -[WAF Comparison]

Cyber-attacks are common nowadays.

To protect web applications from malware or other attacks, you will need a web application firewall or WAF in short. WAFs, help to protect your web apps from attacks so you can work seamlessly.

There are many web application firewalls available to choose from. In this article, we will narrow them down to a list of the best WAF services available on the market.

Sucuri Website Firewall

When it comes to web firewall comparison lists, Sucuri Website Firewall is a serious contender. It offers protection from hackers trying to exploit OWASP’s Top 10 vulnerabilities, including SQLi, XSS, and CSRF.

It also includes mitigation of the Distribution Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks backed by continuous monitoring. Sucuri Website Firewall intercepts and inspects all incoming HTTP/HTTPS requests site.

Although it does not offer custom rules, it has a fast response policy for zero-day vulnerabilities. As and when the vulnerability is made public, Sucuri engineers patch your environment to block attacks trying to exploit that vulnerability.

Prophaze

Prophaze WAF 3.0 is redefining application security with its real WAF /WAAP /Bot /DDoS API Security  Solution, which is entirely built on Kubernetes and backward compatible with all kinds of existing web services and  Web Applications / APIs. Ease of Deployment and user experience is of high quality with Prophaze WAF deployments  Prophaze is available in all Azure / AWS / GCP regions and other cloud providers with 100s of POPs.

Prophaze is the first application-aware, distributed WAF architecture with fewer false positives than any other WAF solution provider.

WAF as a Service is used by cloud providers and Telcom to offer solutions to their customers. Prophaze is available as a cloud WAF, on-premise WAF, appliance model along with its Cloud Native Kubernetes Ingress controller to deployed in a Kubernetes node as well. 

Prophaze was named an innovation leader in 2022 by KuppingerCole Analysts.

AppTrana

AppTrana combines scanning, fully managed web application firewalls, CDN, and monitoring services in one solution. It detects application-layer threats, including OWASP Top 10 and Zero-Day vulnerabilities, accelerates web assets and protects against exploits, and provides managed rules on an ongoing basis to keep up with new risks and threat vectors.

Real-time monitoring also secures web applications from DDoS and BOT attacks.

What makes it useful for small and big businesses is that WAF not only patches vulnerabilities with web application scanning sync, but it also monitors hacker activities on the application to learn new attack patterns and ways to detect and protect against them.

Cloudflare WAF

When it comes to web application firewall comparison, Cloudflare’s collective intelligence is a useful feature to look into. Other than OWASP Top 10 protection and custom rules, this WAF considers pushing custom rules to all clients, if required. This essentially means that your website gets security intelligence from other sites too.

This essentially means that your website gets security intelligence from other sites too.

The company monitors the internet for new types of vulnerabilities, and its engineers study each one to understand what custom rules will best solve the problem.

Cloudflare claims to be powering a million domains and hence has a lot of data on security intelligence and how it can affect the business or/and its customers.

AWS WAF

Just like with other services of Amazon Web Services (AWS), pay only for what you use for their WAF. It blocks all the standard Layer 7 attacks that compromise security or application availability.

Additionally, AWS’s firewall can be deployed either on Application Load Balancer (ALB) or Amazon CloudFront.

The benefits of this WAF include traffic filtering (based on IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP body, or URI strings), AWS cloud integration and support, and virtually real-time analytics.

AWS WAF is an ideal solution for individuals and businesses who’d like to manage their WAF within the AWS Management Console.

Akamai WAF

Akamai’s Kona Web Application Firewall reduces the risk of data theft, downtime, and other security breaches. Its real-time monitoring also provides visibility into security events so that the administrators can take action accordingly.

It offers protection from the most common web-based attacks that exploit Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and malicious file execution. However, DDoS protection is not bundled with WAF and is available as an additional service.

Akamai also offers a myriad of other website performance solutions that includes Content Delivery Network (CDN), Web and Mobile Acceleration, and Traffic Management.

Qualys WAF

Qualys’ Web Application Firewall combines scalability and manageability within its suite of products. This cloud solution not only offers protection from OWASP exploitations but can also be managed under one console that also supports their web application scanning and virtual machines.

Qualys WAF is also integrated with web application scanning solutions to find vulnerabilities and repair them while stopping attacks.

It is available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace and deploys for both public and private cloud web applications. Additionally, it offers web app health checks and server load balancing to boost availability and performance.

WAF is essential for any online business to protect from real-time online threats for business and customer safety. I hope the above list of web application firewalls helps you to choose your web applications.

True Shield WAF by SiteLock

True shield web application firewall is quick and easy to set up WAF service. You can easily set it up within 5 minutes of calling SiteLock. It’s a CDN service that allows visitors to use the site 50% faster than others.

True Shield also comes with SEO protection to protect your SEO efforts from malware. So the search engines don’t find malware on your site; hence won’t block it. Moreover, it is highly accurate and protects you from cyber-attacks with 99.99 percent accuracy.

True Shield comes with three packages, True Shield Basic, True Shield professional, and True Shield Premium. All of these packages have their own advantages, but the premium package which comes at a bit higher price is the best one among them.

F5 Advanced WAF

F5 Advanced Web Firewall Protection is the Next Gen WAF. According to what they claim, it can detect and protect from many attacks that many other WAFs fail to. Moreover, it combines Machine learning to help to protect your website and web applications.

It is an anti-bot Mobile SDK to protect mobile apps from web attacks with the help of behavioral analysis. It has In-Browser data encryption to protect from data extracting malware and REST/JSON, XML, GWT API protocol security.

F5 WAF is an excellent web firewall to protect your website from miscellaneous attacks. With the help of the next-gen anti-malware and cyber-attack engine, it is a pretty decent WAF service.

Wallarm

Advanced Cloud-native WAF protects your web apps from XSS, XXE, SQL Injections, RCE, and other OWASP threats. It is a totally automated service that requires no manual configuration.

It is a reliable service with fast and robust filtering nodes. It offers modern tech stack support like Docker, Kubernetes, and WebSockets, which is further managed by the DevOps toolchain. It also uses machine learning to block attacks with real-time threat protection and various deployment options.

Overall, advanced cloud-native is a feature-loaded web application firewall to counter various threats with high accuracy.

Single Sciences WAF

Single Sciences Complete Cloud-Native web application Firewall is a hybrid and multi-cloud WAF service. Easy deployment and fast management make it a user-friendly and reliable WAF service. With 32000 application protection per month, it is a popular web application firewall on the market.

An easy DevOps team support takes care of basic operational issues and focuses on other threat protection. The next-gen dual agent module helps in fast set-up without impacting performance. Besides, there is a DevOps toolchain for cross-team visibility and a powerful analytical backend for any kind of threat protection.

Single Sciences WAF operates wherever your app operates. It runs from in-apps code, as cloud WAF, from web servers and containers or API gateways. Moreover, a SmartParse configuration doesn’t require manual maintenance.

It is awarded as a visionary in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant. It is one of the best automated WAFs with high accuracy of web application protection.

Imperva WAF

Imperva is another web application firewall that analyzes and inspects requests for your application and blocks attacks. It protects applications in the cloud and on-premises. With excellent security policies and management, you can safely migrate your apps with full protection.

You can deploy Imperva in AWS and Azure, as and Cloud WAF or on-premises. So deployment is flexible and fits the user’s needs with specific service and security levels.

Imperva protects against critical threats like Cross-site scripting, SQL injection, resource access, remote file inclusion, automated top 10 or top 20 threats, and other OWASP threats. Their research team always keeps an eye on the new threats and updates the rule accordingly. Moreover, It uses graphical reporting so you can easily understand the security status of your web app.

Imperva uses dynamic application proofing to detect attacks by analyzing the application’s Directories, URLs, and user inputs. Then it minimizes false positives with correlated attack validation by investigating overall violations in the application. Both of these are combined to protect and block any attack on your application.

Wrapping up

WAF is essential for any online business to protect from real-time online threats for business and customer safety. I hope the above list will help you to choose one for your web applications.