It is safe to assume that web applications come with security vulnerabilities that make them vulnerable to hackers. Research shows that in most cases cross-site scripting (CSS) is at fault, so it is important that you have a protection mechanism that will protect your application from this type of attack.
Similarly, SQL injection and cookie poisoning are other possible attacks. Given the growing scale of these and similar attacks, you need a tool or strategy that would protect your web applications, and that’s where a specialized firewall will help.
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a service that protects your web applications from many application-level attacks like XSS and cookie poisoning.
Here is our list of the best WAFs:
- Sucuri A cloud-based WAF that not only blocks imminent threats but also increases the performance and availability of applications.
- StackPath Provides enterprise-class protection and comes with a host of integration and customization options.
- Akamai Kona This scalable WAF does a good job at monitoring and preventing attacks.
- AppTrana Web Application Firewall Comprehensive system that continuously monitors traffic to and from an application to detect vulnerabilities and threats, and blocks them before they impact the system.
- Cloudflare Intelligent business system is ideal for protecting business-critical web applications.
- AWS WAF Resource-efficient way to monitor systems and to protect them.
- Barracuda WAF Protects websites, APIs, and mobile devices from possible attacks
- Imperva WAF Protects web applications by closely monitoring all data and traffic
- Azure WAF A cloud-native service that provides comprehensive protection for websites and applications.
The Best Web Application Firewalls
1. Sucuri
Sucuri is a cloud-based WAF that aims to prevent website attacks and possible hacks. It increases the speed of loading pages and increases your peace of mind regarding the web application’s availability.
Features:
- Removes website malware
- Due to continuously monitoring, it identifies black sites and submits for their removal
- Repairs SEO spam keywords and link injectors to ensure that your website looks great in search engines
- Filters malicious traffic
- Speeds up the loading time
- Uses scripts and tools to scan for malware
- Provides reliable support
Pricing: Sucuri is available in three plans.
- Basic ($199/year) – Scans once every 12 hours and comes with advanced features such as DDoS mitigation.
- Pro ($299/year) – Scans once every six hours and comes with SSL certificate support, in addition to the features of the Basic plan.
- Business ($499/year) – Scan happens once every 30 minutes.
If you’re looking for a customized solution, reach out to the Sales team at 1-888-873-0817
Download: Click here for a 30-day free trial.
2. StackPath
StackPath is a WAF that provides enterprise-class protection with its powerful integration and customization options. It is also designed to meet the unique needs of most web applications.
Features:
The important features of StackPath are as follows.
- Blocks and resolves application-layer DDoS attacks
- Protects Internet-connected applications
- Controls the access of and protects the value of the content you sell or deliver
- Ensures compliance with regulatory standards
- Offers a slew of tools such as device-level fingerprinting, DDoS attack profiling, integrates with global systems for reducing false positives and identifying emerging threats
- Offers complete customization
- Has many built-in policies.
Pricing: The pricing depends on the number of resources that have to be monitored. Accordingly, there are three options to choose from and they are:
- Virtual machines – Starts at $0.049 per hour
- Containers – Starts at $0.046 per hour
- Serverless scripting – $10 per month and $0.60 for additional 1M requests. Applicable for serverless applications.
Besides these, there are also edge delivery bundles that come in three packages.
- Edge Delivery 20 ($20/month) – Ideal for websites and blogs with standard content and traffic levels.
- Edge Delivery 200 ($200/month) – Works for SMBs that have websites, digital stores, and rich content with more than average traffic.
- Edge Delivery 2000 ($2000/month) – Most suited for large cloud properties and applications with advanced needs.
Download: Request for a demo by clicking here.
3. Akamai Kona Web App Firewall
Akamai Kona Web App Firewall is a cloud-based platform that’s designed to protect any web app from threats. This firewall is highly scalable and continuously monitors applications to protect them from emerging attacks while maintaining its performance.
Source: Akamai
Features:
- Minimizes the risk of a data breach
- Designed to absorb or deflect some of the largest DDoS attacks
- Taps into Akamai’s global distributed architecture to ensure the application’s availability at all times.
- Adapts well to a changing threat landscape
- Continuously refines security rules
- Reduces operational expenses and provides good value for money.
Pricing: Pricing is based on bandwidth and the number of sites. The cost is $15,000 per month for up to five sites and 75Mbps
Download: Click here for a free trial.
4. AppTrana Web Application Firewall
AppTrana is a fully-managed system that protects the application layer from possible attacks by continuously monitoring traffic and blocking emerging threats. This fully-managed system comes with a host of convenient and customizable features as well.
Features:
- Continuously monitors applications to identify vulnerabilities
- Can be customized to meet the specific needs of your application
- Performs automated security scans and manual Pen-testing to identify possible vulnerabilities
- Handles patching
- Combines always-on security and accurate security rules to reduce false positives.
- Ensure round-the-clock availability
- Prevents DDoS before it happens
- Improves website performance
- Provides a 360-degree view of your application
Pricing: AppTrana has two pricing plans and they are:
- Premium plan ($399/month) – Awfully managed site security
- Advance ($99/month) – Provides a comprehensive site security
Download: Click here for a free trial.
5. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is an intelligent and integrated WAF designed to protect business-critical web applications, without changing your infrastructure in any way.
Features:
- The onboarding process is fairly intuitive.
- The APIs make it easy to deploy
- Creates a proprietary threat score by analyzing digital signatures every day.
- Integrates well with popular toolsets for easy configuration
- Comes with customizable analytics and easy integration
- Enables you to create custom rules
- Integrates with the global Anycast network
- Provides high accuracy and reduces false positives
Pricing: There are three pricing plans, namely,
- Pro ($20 per month) – Ideal for professional websites and blogs that require basic performance and security.
- Business ($200 per month) – A good choice for SMBs that have eCommerce websites requiring extensive security and performance.
- Enterprise (Custom pricing) – Comes with round-the-clock support, role-based account access, 100% uptime, access to raw logs, and more.
Download: Click here for a free trial for the enterprise plan.
5. AWS WAF
The AWS WAF protects applications against exploits that impact their availability and performance. It also prevents these exploits from consuming too much of your resources or compromising on the security.
Features:
- Enables you to create security rules that disrupt common attack patterns
- Comes with a pre-configured set of rules that are managed by AWS.
- You pay only for what you use
- Can be deployed on Amazon CloudFront as a part of your CDN
- Provides real-time visibility
- Integrates with the AWS Firewall Manager
Pricing: The pricing is determined by the usage. Web ACLs are charged $5 per month while rules are $1 per month, and both are prorated hourly. For requests, it is $0.60 per million requests.
Download: There are no free plans or trials.
6. Barracuda Web Application Firewall
Barracuda Web Application Firewall is an advanced application that stops data breaches and eliminates vulnerabilities. It comes with a host of features that provide comprehensive protection for all your applications and resources.
Features:
- Ensures protection from DDoS and web-based attacks
- Protects APIs and mobile devices as well
- Block malicious bots
- Increases availability
- Controls access and authentication
- Prevents automated attacks
- Orchestrates security
Pricing: Contact the sales team for custom pricing.
Download: Click here for a free trial.
7. Imperva WAF
Imperva WAF analyzes incoming traffic to protect your data, stop attacks, and ensure uninterrupted business operations.
Features:
The key features of Imperva WAF are:
- Guarantees 99.999% uptime SLA
- Blocks more than 600 million attacks per day
- Provides extensive reporting and analytics
- Gives security at DevOps speed
- Comes with flexible deployment options
- Reduces web app risk
- Secures active and legacy applications, third-party applications, APIs and microservices, containers, virtual machines, cloud applications, and more.
Pricing: Imperva WAF offers four plans and they are:
- Free
- Pro ($59/site/month)
- Business ($299/site/month)
- Enterprise (Contact the vendor)
Download: Click here to request a demo for this product.
8. Azure Web Application Firewall
Azure Web Application Firewall is a cloud-native service to provide comprehensive and powerful protection for web applications and websites.
Features:
- Protection for the top 10 OWASP security vulnerabilities
- Deploys in minutes
- Comes with a one-click security
- The security rules can be customized to meet your web app’s security needs
- Provides near real-time visibility through Azure Monitor
- Increases throughput with edge load balancing and application acceleration
- Has built-in auto-scaling and zone redundancy
Pricing: Contact the sales team for a custom quote.
Download: Click here to try Azure free for 12 months.
Choosing a WAF
The good news is that WAF services are offered by many companies, so you are spoiled for choice. But not all of them are built the same, so it’s important to analyze the features of the different products on offer before determining which of these work best for your type of network and organization.
Web application firewalls are a great way to protect your websites and web applications from application-layer vulnerabilities and attacks. These WAF services come in many flavors, though by and large, all of them cover the basic vulnerabilities and enhance the throughput and speed of your applications. Let us know what WAF service you use!
