Best Web Application Firewalls (WAF) for Startups
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Compare the Top Web Application Firewalls (WAF) for Startups as of October 2026
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What are Web Application Firewalls (WAF) for Startups?
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are security solutions that protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between the application and the internet. They detect and block threats such as SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other common attacks targeting application vulnerabilities. WAFs analyze incoming requests in real time, applying customizable security rules to distinguish between legitimate and potentially malicious traffic. Many WAFs are cloud-based, enabling flexible and scalable protection without impacting application performance. By acting as a shield between web applications and attackers, WAFs help ensure data security, regulatory compliance, and uninterrupted user access. Compare and read user reviews of the best Web Application Firewalls (WAF) for Startups currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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5centsCDN
5centsCDN
Experience cutting-edge content delivery with 5centsCDN's subscription plans: CDN Plans Standard: From $2.5/TB, with 10+ Points of Presence and delivery in NA and EU only. Enterprise: From $15/TB, offering 50+ Points of Presence for worldwide content delivery. CDN+ Plans Standard+: From $10/TB, with 20+ Points of Presence and delivery in NA and EU only. Enterprise+: From $35/TB, access 70+ Points of Presence for worldwide content delivery. Join over 5000 satisfied clients, including OTT platforms, IPTV providers, agencies, gamers, government bodies, NGOs, and major TV channels who trust 5centsCDN for advanced video-on-demand streaming and live streaming solutions. Our robust network ensures lightning-fast, secure, and cost-effective content delivery, along with essential features like web acceleration.Starting Price: $2.50 -
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SKUDONET
SKUDONET
SKUDONET Enterprise Edition is an Application Delivery and Security Platform built on Linux Debian 12.5 LTS for critical enterprise environments. Formerly known as Zevenet, it provides advanced L4/L7 load balancing, integrated WAF, TLS management with Let’s Encrypt and wildcard support, and protocol-aware traffic inspection across on-premises, hybrid, or cloud deployments, including SkudoCloud SaaS. A free trial is available for evaluation on the SKUDONET website. Key Features & Benefits: • High Availability: Clustering and failover to minimize downtime. • Advanced Security: WAF, L7 filtering, DoS protection, TLS with Let’s Encrypt and wildcard support. • Scalability: Optimized for high-throughput workloads with multi-core processing and efficient packet handling. • Traffic Control: Session persistence, custom routing rules, and granular L4/L7 inspection. • Centralized Management: Unified dashboard for configuration, monitoring, and policy automation.Starting Price: $1736/year/appliance -
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CacheGuard
CacheGuard Technologies
CacheGuard-OS is a free, open-source Linux-based network security appliance OS that turns any standard x86 machine into a UTM gateway. It sits between your devices and your ISP router, becoming the checkpoint for all internet traffic — no IT team required. Open-source since its first release, CacheGuard-OS includes: stateful firewall, web antivirus (ClamAV), URL filtering, SSL inspection, WAF (ModSecurity), VPN server (StrongSwan), web cache (Squid), QoS (IPRoute2), and WAN load balancing. It installs on bare metal or any common hypervisor in under an hour. Configuration is handled through a web-based admin interface with no command-line expertise needed. Built for small businesses, schools, and sysadmins who need production-grade network security on commodity hardware.Starting Price: $0 -
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Vercel
Vercel
Vercel is an AI-powered cloud platform that helps developers build, deploy, and scale high-performance web experiences with speed and security. It provides a unified set of tools, templates, and infrastructure designed to streamline development workflows from idea to global deployment. With support for modern frameworks like Next.js, Svelte, Vite, and Nuxt, teams can ship fast, responsive applications without managing complex backend operations. Vercel’s AI Cloud includes an AI Gateway, SDKs, workflow automation tools, and fluid compute, enabling developers to integrate large language models and advanced AI features effortlessly. The platform emphasizes instant global distribution, enabling deployments to become available worldwide immediately after a git push. Backed by strong security and performance optimizations, Vercel helps companies deliver personalized, reliable digital experiences at massive scale. -
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Unprotected web applications and APIs are the easiest point of entry for hackers and vulnerable to a number of attack types. FortiWeb's AI-enhanced and multi-layered approach protects your web apps from the OWASP Top 10 and more. FortiWeb ML customizes the protection of each application, providing robust protection without requiring the time-consuming manual tuning required by other solutions. With ML, FortiWeb identifies anomalous behavior and, more importantly, distinguishes between malicious and benign anomalies. The solution also features robust bot mitigation capabilities, allowing benign bots to connect (e.g. search engines) while blocking malicious bot activity. FortiWeb also features API discovery and security, as well as threat analytics to identify meaningful security incidents. FortiWeb is available as an appliance, VM, and fully featured WAF-as-a-Service - which is available to trial and purchase in most cloud marketplaces.Starting Price: $30/mo for 1 app on SaaS
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AppTrana
Indusface
Indusface’s AppTrana is a fully managed web application firewall that ensures risk-based protection with its DDoS, API risk, and Bot mitigation services while assuring web acceleration with secure CDN. Combining automated scanning with manual pen-testing, it detects application vulnerabilities. All of this with 24x7 expert support to meet zero false-positive guarantees. Indusface is the only vendor to be named Customers’ Choice for WAAP in all the 7 segments of the Gartner VoC 2022 Report.Starting Price: $99/month -
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Haltdos
Haltdos
Haltdos promises an intelligent WAF & DDoS mitigation service with multi-layered security to online businesses requiring zero management. It is a self-learning solution that continuously learns and adapts network/website traffic and provides real-time and historical insights with stunning visualization. It also provides attack alerts and notifications, attack signatures, customer misbehavior, and audit trail. -
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Sucuri
Sucuri
Our dedicated researchers monitor active malware campaigns. With a trained team of analysts, we aim to provide the best malware removal service around. Best in class tools and scripts scan your website for malware in real-time. Our security analysts examine the source code to detect any irregularities. No hack is too complex for our incident response team to detect and fix. If you need immediate assistance, we can accomodate. Choose a plan that fits your needs. Chat with us to learn about our one-time priority cleanup service. We specialize in eliminating complex malware infections. We guarantee your fixed price, regardless of frequency or level of sophistication. All website security packages cover your site for a year, including unlimited cleanups, pages, and databases. Your site is a perfect fit for Sucuri, whether you use a CMS or not. We fix any website malware infection and specialize in open-source content management systems.Starting Price: $9.99 per month -
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Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
Barracuda
Get comprehensive protection for on-premises and multi-cloud deployment using the firewall built in and for the cloud. Frictionless, cloud-hosted Advanced Threat Protection detects and blocks advanced threats, including zero-day and ransomware attacks. Gain rapid protection against the newest threats with the help of a global threat intelligence network fed by millions of data collection points. Modern cyber threats such as ransomware and advanced persistent threats, targeted attacks, and zero-day threats, require progressively sophisticated defense techniques that balance accurate threat detection with fast response times. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall offers a comprehensive set of next-generation firewall technologies to ensure real-time network protection against a broad range of network threats, vulnerabilities, and exploits, including SQL injections, cross-site scripting, denial of service attacks, trojans, viruses, worms, spyware, and many more. -
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WebARX
WebARX
Protect websites from plugin vulnerabilities. WebARX is not just a security plugin – it is much more. Block malicious traffic with our lightweight web application firewall. Create your own firewall rules with WebARX firewall engine. Monitor your websites for possible security issues and vulnerabilities. WebARX is actively updated and helps you adapt the latest security practices. Generate weekly security reports and stay alerted when anything needs your immediate attention.Starting Price: $14.99 per month -
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Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) protect your apps with behavioral analytics, proactive bot defense, and application-layer encryption of sensitive data. Use the ROI Estimator from F5 and Forrester to find out how Advanced WAF can improve your security posture and save you money. The F5 F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF provides a powerful set of security features that will keep your Web Applications safe from attack. Many WAFs offer a basic level of protection from attack at the higher layers of the OSI stack, but the F5 Advanced WAF takes things even further and offers some serious security features like Anti Bot Mobile SDK, Credential Stuffing threat feeds, Proactive Bot Defense, and Datasafe to name a few. Protect your apps, APIs, and data against the most prevalent attacks such as zero-day vulnerabilities, app-layer DoS attacks, threat campaigns, application takeover, and bots.
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Mitigate web app attacks and vulnerabilities with comprehensive security controls and uniform policy and observability via our SaaS-delivered WAF that’s quick to set up and deploy, and easy to manage and scale across any environment. Simplify app security by seamlessly integrating protections into the development process with core security functionality, centralized orchestration, and oversight. F5 Distributed Cloud WAF eases the burden and complexity of consistently securing apps across clouds, on-premises, and edge locations. Delivering the programmability that DevOps needs combined with the efficacy and oversight that SecOps mandates, enabling faster, more secure application delivery and release cycles. Quickly improve visibility and insight across all security events including WAF signatures hit, DoS events, automated and persistent threats, and all other client interactions along with app performance, including intuitive drill-down capabilities.
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Fortinet
Fortinet
Fortinet is a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, known for its comprehensive and integrated approach to safeguarding digital networks, devices, and applications. Founded in 2000, Fortinet provides a wide range of products and services, including firewalls, endpoint protection, intrusion prevention systems, and secure access solutions. At the core of its offerings is the Fortinet Security Fabric, a unified platform that seamlessly integrates security tools to deliver visibility, automation, and real-time threat intelligence across the entire network. Trusted by businesses, governments, and service providers worldwide, Fortinet emphasizes innovation, scalability, and performance, ensuring robust defense against evolving cyber threats while supporting digital transformation and business continuity. -
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Fastly
Fastly
Empower your developers, connect with your customers, and grow your business with today’s leading edge cloud platform. Deliver the best online experiences possible with our edge cloud platform, built to strengthen your current teams and technology. We move data and applications closer to your users — at the edge of the network — to help your websites and apps perform faster, safer, and at global scale. Fastly's highly programmable CDN gives you the freedom to customize delivery right at the edge. Delight your users with the content they want at their fingertips. Our powerful POPs, driven by solid-state drives (SSDs) and hosted in well-connected locations around the world, help us keep more content in cache longer for fewer trips to the origin. Instant Purge and batch purging with surrogate keys let you cache and invalidate highly dynamic content with a mean purge time of 150 milliseconds*. Serve headlines, inventory, or weather forecasts that are always up to date. -
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Loadbalancer.org
Loadbalancer.org
Since 2003, Loadbalancer.org has provided reliable, versatile and cost-effective load balancers engineered to improve the availability of your most critical IT applications. We have extensive experience of solving application delivery challenges, so you can expect honest advice and outstanding support from the load balancer experts. Working closely with leading technology providers in medical, object storage and print, our ADC solutions are specifically tailored to ensure seamless integration and better compatibility for enhanced performance of the entire solution.Starting Price: $95 per month -
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Traceable
Harness
Meet the Industry’s Context-Aware API Security Platform Traceable identifies all of your APIs, and evaluates your API risk posture, stops API attacks that lead to incidents such as data exfiltration, and provides analytics for threat hunting and forensic research. With our solution, you can confidently discover, manage and secure all of your APIs, quickly deploy, and easily scale to meet the ongoing needs of your organization. If you’re planning on improving the data security posture in your APIs, Traceable would love the opportunity to discuss how we could help and share some of our lessons learned from working with enterprise customers like Canon, Informatica, Outreach, and many others.Starting Price: $0 -
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SafeLine WAF
Chaitin Tech
SafeLine WAF is a self-hosted, semantic-based Web Application Firewall developed by the team at Chaitin Technology. It focuses on protecting web applications from a wide range of threats, especially zero-day and application-layer (Layer 7) attacks, with high precision and minimal false positives. It is open source, easy to deploy, and designed to be flexible enough for both enterprise and personal use.Starting Price: $0/month -
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Edgenexus Load Balancer (ADC/WAF/GSLB)
Edgenexus
Choose us because we offer the easiest to use technology without sacrificing features or performance. We back this up with outstanding support and care, delivered under a fair and cost effective pricing model Our technology is used by the smallest startups with big ideas and small budgets all the way to global enterprises and anything in between. We love them all the same! Easy to use Load balancing, WAF, GSLB and SSO/Pre-Authentication. It is also the Only true ADP Application Delivery Platform where the functionality and lifespan can be enhanced using the app store or applications that you develop in house.Starting Price: $50 -
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MyDiamo
Penta Security Systems Inc.
Developed by Penta Security Systems, an APAC leader in encryption technology and web application firewall, MyDiamo is a free open-source database encryption solution, available to all for non-commercial use. The commercial license is available for enterprises and organizations that desire extended features. -
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Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service
Barracuda
Configuring traditional web application firewalls can take days of effort. But Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service—a full-featured, cloud-delivered application security service—breaks the mold. Deploy it, configure it, and put it into full production—protecting all your apps from all the threats—in just minutes. -
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Azure Application Gateway
Microsoft
Protect your applications from common web vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. Monitor your web applications using custom rules and rule groups to suit your requirements and eliminate false positives. Get application-level load-balancing services and routing to build a scalable and highly available web front end in Azure. Autoscaling offers elasticity by automatically scaling Application Gateway instances based on your web application traffic load. Application Gateway is integrated with several Azure services. Azure Traffic Manager supports multiple-region redirection, automatic failover, and zero-downtime maintenance. Use Azure Virtual Machines, virtual machine scale sets, or the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service in your back-end pools. Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center provide centralized monitoring and alerting, and an application health dashboard. Key Vault offers central management and automatic renewal of SSL certificates.Starting Price: $18.25 per month -
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Modshield SB
StrongBox IT
Modshield SB Web Application Firewall (WAF) – Powered by Modsecurity and OWASP CRS, is tailor-made to fit all your application security needs. Modshield SB is packed with security features that enable a 360-degree protection for your applications and hosting infrastructure. Powered by the OWASP Core Ruleset, Modshield SB provides optimal coverage against OWASP Top 10 threat vectors, automation protection and protection against credential stuffing attacks. Why Modshield SB Web Application firewall? Modshield SB helps you to commit to your business users, Confidentialty, Integrity and Availability of business applications. Implementing an enterprise grade first line of defense, for your applications has never been simpler. Powered by the OWASP Core Ruleset, Modshield SB inherently protects all your applications against the OWASP Top 10 threats. You are no longer required to run a seperate Load Balancer. Take advantage of Modshield SB's built-in load balancer.Starting Price: $0.58 per hour -
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BaishanCloud
BaishanCloud
BaishanCloud provides seamless and reliable CDN with regional expertise, especially in China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Reach the audience globally through more than 1000 PoPs, with highly secured anti-DDoS and WAF protection, and private networks. That is the reason why BaishanCloud has been trusted by the world’s top short media platforms with more than 10M users because of its high availability, high concurrency, and low-latency one-stop content delivery solution. Powered by edge computing and years of media industry service experience, BaishanCloud helps minimize the high-security risks across the site to guarantee continuous and stable major events and smooth video content delivery. BaishanCloud offers flexible customizations and special features to ensure our service and products are tailored to the customers’ needs. Get BaishanCloud’s free trial or select more features by customizing your own plan starting at $0.065/GB for the first 4TB global traffic.Starting Price: $0.065 per GB -
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Azure Web Application Firewall
Microsoft
Azure Web Application Firewall is a cloud-native service that protects web apps from common web-hacking techniques such as SQL injection and security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting. Deploy the service in minutes to get complete visibility into your environment and block malicious attacks. Protect your web applications in just a few minutes with the latest managed and preconfigured rule sets. The Azure Web Application Firewall detection engine combined with updated rule sets increases security, reduces false positives, and improves performance. Use Azure Policy to help enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at scale for Web Application Firewall resources. Get an aggregated view to evaluate the overall state of your environment.Starting Price: $0.443 per gateway per hour -
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WEDOS Protection
WEDOS Group SA
WEDOS Protection is a modern security solution combining powerful DDoS mitigation, CDN acceleration, and intelligent traffic filtering — designed for high availability, stability, and optimal web performance. It protects serious online businesses against volumetric and sophisticated application-layer attacks, including botnets and L7 exploits. Our global infrastructure WEDOS Global uses edge servers distributed worldwide to analyze and control traffic in real time. The service provides DNS protection, an advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF), HTTPS proxy, smart caching, anti-bot filters, and multiple protection layers that together form a robust security and performance ecosystem. ✅ Effective L3–L7 DDoS mitigation ✅ Global content acceleration via proprietary network ✅ Easy to implement – no code changes needed ✅ High availability and low latency even during attacks An ideal choice for high-traffic websites, ecommerce projects, agencies, and hosting providers.Starting Price: $1 -
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A10 Thunder ADC
A10 Networks
High-performance advanced load balancing solution that enables your applications to be highly available, accelerated, and secure. Ensure efficient and reliable application delivery across multiple datacenters and cloud. Minimize latency and downtime, and enhance end-user experience. Increase application security with advanced SSL/TLS offload, single sign-on (SSO), DDoS protection and Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities. Complete full-proxy Layer 4 load balancer and Layer 7 load balancer with flexible aFleX® scripting and customizable server health checks. -
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Alert Logic
Fortra
Alert Logic is the only managed detection and response (MDR) provider that delivers comprehensive coverage for public clouds, SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Since no level of investment prevents or blocks 100% of attacks, you need to continuously identify and address breaches or gaps before they cause real damage. With limited expertise and a cloudcentric strategy, this level of security can seem out of reach. Our cloud-native technology and white-glove team of security experts protect your organization 24/7 and ensure you have the most effective response to resolve whatever threats may come. Founded in 2002, Alert Logic is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has business operations, team members, and channel partners located worldwide. Learn more at alertlogic.com. Alert Logic – unrivaled security for your cloud journey. -
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R&S Web Application Firewall
Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity
R&S®Web Application Firewall (WAF) in combination with a network firewall significantly increases the security level of your company. This keeps you up to date with the requirements of a modern and resilient IT infrastructure. With decades of development and practical experience, our web application firewall solution effectively protects the corporate network against widespread attacks such as zero-day exploits, SQL injections, cross site scripting or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks at the application level. Our web application firewall ensures optimal protection of critical enterprise applications, including legacy applications and custom APIs, against complex attacks while considering data protection regulations. As the business world becomes increasingly web-based, web applications play a growing role in enterprises. Cybercriminals are increasingly taking advantage of vulnerabilities in these web applications. -
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Barracuda Web Application Firewall
Barracuda
Application security is increasingly complex. Barracuda makes it simple. Barracuda Web Application Firewall is a part of Barracuda Cloud Application Protection, an integrated platform that brings a comprehensive set of interoperable solutions and capabilities together to ensure complete application security. Barracuda Web Application Firewall protects applications, APIs, and mobile app backends against a variety of attacks including the OWASP Top 10, zero-day threats, data leakage, and application-layer denial of service (DoS) attacks. By combining signature-based policies and positive security with robust anomaly-detection capabilities, Barracuda Web Application Firewall can defeat today’s most sophisticated attacks targeting your web applications. Barracuda Active DDoS Prevention, an add-on service for the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, filters out volumetric DDoS attacks before they ever reach your network and harm your apps. -
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ThreatSign Website Anti Malware
Quttera
ThreatSign Web Protection: Your Digital Fortification Adaptive Intelligence: Dynamic algorithms learn from patterns, anticipate threats, and adapt. No static defenses—ThreatSign evolves with the threat landscape. Zero-Day Shielding: Proactively neutralize vulnerabilities before they strike. Sleep soundly knowing your assets are fortified. Advanced WAF: Impenetrable barrier filters malicious traffic without hindering user experience. Swift Incident Response: Minimal downtime, maximum peace of mind. Your business continuity is our priority. Customized Defense: Tailored to your unique needs, whether e-commerce or financial. Financial Sector Ready: Compliance, data protection, trust. 24/7 Vigilance: Real-time monitoring, expert support. Blocklist Resolution: We meticulously analyze the issue, identify the root cause, and work tirelessly to remove your site from blocklists like Google Safe Browsing and other authorities. Elevate your security. Defend your domain.Starting Price: $10 per month
