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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Fastly comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
4.2
F5 Distributed Cloud Services reduces costs by 30%, saves engineering time, lowers support overhead, and enhances security efficiency.
Sentiment score
6.0
Fastly boosts return on investment with improved performance, reduced latency, and cuts infrastructure costs by 40-60%.
I would estimate the cost was reduced by approximately 30 percent in the first year.
Information Security at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is definitely a return on investment in F5 Distributed Cloud Services.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
I do find F5 Distributed Cloud Services to be cost-effective, as it brings benefits and a strong return on investment.
Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at BMB
Realizing a 30 to 50% reduction in latency and page load time, ensuring users experience a seamless workflow.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
I have seen a return on investment, particularly in time savings, especially regarding the changes.
Cloud architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.3
F5 support excels in expertise and reliability but needs faster response times for enhanced user satisfaction in call and email services.
Sentiment score
6.3
Fastly's customer care is efficient with multi-channel support, but has inconsistencies in response times and transparency across time zones.
There is a lot of support from F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the knowledge on the page is very good and reliable.
Engineer Solutions Architect at SCitum
I would provide 9.5 for support.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Email services are good, but they need to have a good human-based interaction with the call centers.
Senior Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
demonstrating the team's technical expertise in CDN and Edge architecture
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
We have SLAs defined because we opted for enterprise support pricing.
Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in scalable traffic management, with minimal configuration effort and no major limitations encountered.
Sentiment score
6.4
Fastly is praised for scalability, ease of growth support, cloud flexibility, excellent support, and successful global integrations.
I need the traffic management environments in distributed management, which have a very good goal to manage very difficult traffic in the world.
Engineer Solutions Architect at SCitum
We have not hit any major scalability limitations so far.
Project Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Seamlessly handling massive traffic without requiring backend changes due to its globally distributed Edge network and stateless API-driven design.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers 99.99% uptime and stable performance, praised for reliability, redundancy, and minimal operational issues.
Sentiment score
7.3
Fastly is stable and reliable with high uptime, no technical issues, and strong performance in enterprise applications.
I won't face any issues with stability as a concern because it provides the load balancers and all redundancy, so it's very unlikely that we have any downtime.
Senior Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
Highly reliable for enterprise-scale applications with high uptime guarantees.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
 

Room For Improvement

F5 Distributed Cloud Services should simplify UI/UX, expand regional presence, enhance integration, and address pricing and usability concerns.
Fastly requires improvements in China presence, configuration complexity, pricing, customer support, security features, documentation, and bot detection.
Making it easier to follow the traffic path and quickly see where something is going wrong would be a great enhancement.
Project Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF.
IT Analyst at Atlas.cz, a.s.
For availability, they have added additional clusters across all the regional edges in the Kubernetes clusters to enhance availability.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples.
Cloud architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Setup Cost

Fastly is competitively priced with usage-based costs and customizable options, but some find it expensive with a learning curve.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable.
Engineer Solutions Architect at SCitum
I believe the prices are much higher than I expected, but for the time being, the customer is still paying.
Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at BMB
It operates on a pay-as-you-go structure, but costs scale with traffic, requiring monitoring to avoid unexpected spikes based on data transfers and the number of requests handled.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
In terms of price, I find it good.
Cloud architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers user-friendly security, multi-cloud networking, and seamless integration, enhancing reliability and reducing complexity.
Fastly CDNs integrate with Signal Sciences WAF for efficient content delivery, enhancing performance with global edge locations and code management.
The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation.
IT Analyst at Atlas.cz, a.s.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well.
Senior Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting.
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
The best feature that Fastly offers is the Edge location, which reduces latency, making our applications work smoother because we do not have to constantly call the backend.
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
Fastly has a wide number of configuration features that can be performed, and I emphasize that they can be done from code, which makes it much more traceable.
Cloud architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and WAF, web application firewall, additionally image optimization.
Technical support engineer at Adobe
 

Categories and Ranking

F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in CDN
6th
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
API Security (8th)
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
7th
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
25th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 5.0%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Distributed Cloud Services2.2%
Fastly5.0%
Other92.8%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management
F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.
Pranay Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior software engineer at Simplify vms
Edge caching has transformed response times and delivers faster candidate data globally
Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users. A more user-friendly, UI-based configuration could simplify the experience, alongside better templates for common use cases and dashboard improvements, as the current dashboard feels complex for beginners, and pricing can be hard to predict for smaller companies. I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities. However, VCL complexity and pricing predictability, especially for smaller companies, along with a user-friendly dashboard are areas impacting my score.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
Regarding pricing, I believe the prices are much higher than I expected, but for the time being, the customer is still paying. It is not really a cheap product. From a pricing perspective, there sh...
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I do not have any specific areas that need improvement. There do not appear to be any features that clients would like to see included or functionalities that can be enhanced at this time.
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I address security threats to my clients and customers through the capabilities of F5 Distributed Cloud Services, but I need clarification on some details.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?
In terms of price, I find it good, and as I mentioned, the implementation cost had some difficulty at the beginning due to the learning curve.
What needs improvement with Fastly?
I think Fastly could improve by improving the documentation and having some code examples so that it is easier for developers, since at the beginning it becomes a bit complicated.
What is your primary use case for Fastly?
My primary use case for Fastly is using it as a CDN to speed up my customers' access to the applications. A specific example of how Fastly has helped improve my customers' access to the application...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.