Forrester Research has recognized Cloudflare as a Leader in it's The Forrester Wave™: Web Application Firewall Solutions, Q1 2025 report. This market analysis helps security and risk professionals select the right solution for their needs. According to Forrester:
“Cloudflare is a strong option for customers that want to manage an easy-to-use, unified web application protection platform that will continue to innovate.”
In this evaluation, Forrester assessed 10 Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors across 22 criteria, including product security and vision. We believe this recognition is due to our continued investment in our product offering. Get a complimentary copy of the report here.
Since introducing our first WAF in 2013, Cloudflare has transformed it into a robust, enterprise-grade Application Security platform. Our fully integrated suite includes WAF, bot mitigation, API security, client-side protection, and DDoS mitigation, all built on our expansive global network. By leveraging AI and machine learning, we deliver industry-leading security while enhancing application performance through our content delivery and optimization solutions.
According to the Forrester report, “Cloudflare stands out with features that help customers work more efficiently.” Unlike other solutions in the market, Cloudflare’s WAF, API Security, bot detection, client-side security, and DDoS protection are natively integrated within a single platform, running on a unified engine. Our integrated solution empowers a seamless user experience and enables advanced threat detection across multiple vectors to meet the most demanding security requirements.
Cloudflare: a standout in Application Security
Forrester’s evaluation of Web Application Firewall solutions is one of the most comprehensive assessments in the industry. We believe this report highlights Cloudflare’s integrated global cloud platform and our ability to deliver enterprise-grade security without added complexity. We don’t just offer a WAF — we provide a flexible, customizable security toolkit designed to address your unique application security challenges.
Cloudflare continuously leads the WAF market through our strategic vision and the breadth of our capabilities. We center our approach on relentless innovation, delivering industry-leading security features, and ensuring a seamless management experience with enterprise processes and tools such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and DevOps. Our predictable cadence of major feature releases, powered by annual initiatives like Security Week and Birthday Week, ensures that customers always have access to the latest security advancements.
We believe Forrester also highlighted Cloudflare’s extensive security capabilities, with particular recognition of the significant improvements in our API security offerings.
Cloudflare’s top-ranked criteria
In the report, Cloudflare received the highest possible scores in 15 out of 22 criteria, reinforcing, in our opinion, our commitment to delivering the most advanced, flexible and easy-to-use web application protection in the industry. Some of the key criteria include:
Detection models: Advanced AI and machine learning models that continuously evolve to detect new threats.
Layer 7 DDoS protection: Industry-leading mitigation of sophisticated application-layer attacks.
Rule creation and modification: Simple, easy to use rule creation experience, propagating within seconds globally.
Management UI: An intuitive and efficient user interface that simplifies security management.
Product security: A robust architecture that ensures enterprise-grade security.
Infrastructure-as-code support: Seamless integration with DevOps workflows for automated security policy enforcement.
Innovation: A forward-thinking approach to security, consistently pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
What sets Cloudflare apart?
First, Cloudflare’s WAF goes beyond traditional rule-based protections, offering a comprehensive suite of detection mechanisms to identify attacks and vulnerabilities across web and API traffic while also safeguarding client environments. We leverage AI and machine learning to detect threats such as attacks, automated traffic, anomalies, and compromised JavaScript, among others. Our industry-leading application-layer DDoS protection makes volumetric attacks a thing of the past.
Second, Cloudflare has also made significant strides in API security. Our WAF can be supercharged with features such as: API discovery, schema validation & sequence mitigation, volumetric detection, and JWT authentication.
Third, Cloudflare simplifies security management with an intuitive dashboard that is easy to use while still offering powerful configurations for advanced practitioners. All features are Terraform-supported, allowing teams to manage the entire Cloudflare platform as code. With Security Analytics, customers gain a comprehensive view of all traffic, whether mitigated or not, and can run what-if scenarios to test new rules before deployment. This analytic capability ensures that businesses can dynamically adapt their security posture while maintaining high performance. To make security management even more seamless, our AI agent, powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), helps users craft and refine custom rules and create powerful visualizations within our analytics engine.
Cloudflare: the clear choice for modern security
We are confident that Forrester’s report validates what our customers already know: Cloudflare is a leading WAF vendor, offering unmatched security, innovation, and ease of use. As threats continue to evolve, we remain committed to pushing the boundaries of web security to protect organizations worldwide.
If you’re looking for a powerful, scalable, and easy-to-manage web application firewall, Cloudflare is the best choice for securing your applications, APIs, and infrastructure.
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Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .