2 categories · RankedCloudflare WAF
Cloudflare WAF is a web application firewall from Cloudflare that works alongside managed rulesets such as OWASP and Cloudflare Managed, and aims to identify bypasses and malicious payloads before they are exploited · cloudflare.com ↗
Leads at small business. Ranked 1 of 72 for enterprise buyers.
The standing depends on who is buying. Every model is asked the same questions for each company size.
Ranked first. Next is Sucuri WAF at 2%.
Ranked first. Next is Sucuri WAF at 4%. 13 of 14 models made it the first choice when asked directly.
Ranked first. Next is Imperva Cloud WAF at 19%.
Why models recommend it
“For most mid‑market B2B companies the Cloudflare WAF is the easiest, most cost‑effective way to get enterprise‑grade protection today.”MiniMax M2.5 · Direct question · first choice
“Cloudflare WAF with Bot Manager is the best overall choice due to its strong security, ease of deployment, and cost-effective pricing”Mistral Small · Paraphrase question · first choice
“For most small‑to‑midsize companies on a tight budget, Cloudflare’s free or low‑cost WAF tier is the best starting point.”GLM 4.7 FlashX · Budget-constrained question · first choice
“For most budget-conscious businesses, starting with Cloudflare Pro ($20/month) yields the highest return on investment.”Gemini 3.5 Flash · Budget-constrained question · first choice
What gives them pause
“Popular and low-latency, but criticized for outdated ModSecurity rules, support delays (e.g., 48+ hours), latency in some cases, false negatives, and bypasses”Grok 4.20 · Negative question · warning
“A significant 2024 vulnerability (discovered by Zafran) revealed a pervasive misconfiguration bug affecting these major WAF providers”Kimi K2 · Negative question · warning
“These avoid high licensing costs (often $5K–$50K+/year for commercial tools like Cloudflare Enterprise, AWS WAF, or Imperva)”Grok 4.20 · Budget-constrained question · warning
“their effectiveness against advanced web application attacks is sometimes questioned”Mistral Small · Negative question · warning
Also on the shortlist
The products named in the same answers as Cloudflare WAF, over the 219 answers that named it, and how often each was the first choice instead.
| Product | Named together | Picked instead | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 162 | 0 | Compare → | |
| 137 | 10 | Compare → | |
| 102 | 4 | View → | |
| 77 | 0 | View → | |
| 69 | 2 | Compare → | |
| 55 | 0 | View → | |
| 55 | 0 | View → | |
| 43 | 1 | View → | |
| 41 | 1 | Compare → | |
| 34 | 0 | View → |
What the models named instead of Cloudflare WAF →
A side-by-side page exists where both products are among a category's top eight.
At a glance
Stated on Cloudflare WAF's own site, not checked by Gane.
- For
- Enterprise, Pro and Biz customers
- Price stated
- More information on pricing and packaging will be released when the feature will be generally available.
- Free plan or trial
- Available on all plans
- Also from Cloudflare
- Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 for Families, Cloudflare AI Gateway, Cloudflare API Gateway, Cloudflare API Security, Cloudflare API Shield, Cloudflare Access and 43 more
How this is measured
Fourteen AI models from 12 labs are asked the same buying questions six ways, for three company sizes. Standings refresh every edition.
Gane sells AI visibility software. No company can pay to change a result.
Read the method →Sources returned with these answers
Fourteen of the fourteen models returned a source list in this edition: five return the pages they cited and nine the search results they consulted. These counts come from 185 of the 219 answers that named Cloudflare WAF and are not a share of its labels.
Domains cited
394 of the 553 domain citations in answers naming Cloudflare WAF came from a third party's page. Thirty-four were to the publisher's own pages (the Gane Index), which the models cite like any other source; they are not counted as a third party.
Pages cited
Pages are listed as the models cited them.
By model
| Model | First choice | Alternative | Mention | Warning | Labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| GPT-5.4 mini | 4 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 6 |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 6 |
| Perplexity Sonar | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Grok 4.20 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 6 |
| Mistral Small | 4 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| Llama 4 Maverick | 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 4 |
| Qwen 3.7 Flash | 3 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 6 |
| Kimi K2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| GLM 4.7 FlashX | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| MiniMax M2.5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 5 |
| GPT-6 Luna | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Muse Glimmer 30B | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |