Every team running a public web app or API eventually asks the same question: which web application firewall actually stops the next attack without breaking the checkout page. It’s one of the more consequential decisions in the broader cloud computing stack, since a bad WAF rule can take down a working product as fast as an actual attacker can. In September 2026, that shortlist almost always comes down to two names. AWS WAF ties directly into the services you already run inside AWS. Cloudflare WAF sits in front of your domain the moment DNS points at Cloudflare, regardless of where your servers live. Both shipped real product changes in the last three months, and both publish enough pricing and benchmark data to make a fair, numbers-based comparison possible.

This guide compares AWS WAF vs Cloudflare WAF on published 2026 pricing, independent OWASP coverage scores, bot management, rate limiting, DDoS handling during 2025’s record attack quarters, and the practical steps for migrating from one to the other. Every figure below traces back to an AWS or Cloudflare announcement, a SecureIQLab validation report, or another named, dated source.

The two products solve the same problem from opposite directions, and that difference shapes almost everything else in this comparison. AWS WAF assumes your traffic already passes through an AWS resource and adds a rule engine on top of it. Cloudflare WAF assumes nothing about your hosting and instead becomes the front door itself. Neither approach is wrong, but picking the one that fights your existing architecture instead of working with it is the most common WAF mistake teams make in 2026.

What AWS WAF Does and Where It Runs

AWS WAF is a rule engine that attaches to specific AWS resources rather than sitting in front of a domain the way a CDN does. It protects Amazon CloudFront distributions, Application Load Balancers, API Gateway REST APIs, AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs, Amazon Cognito user pools, AWS App Runner services, and AWS Verified Access instances. As of May 1, 2026, AWS raised the default quota for resource associations per web ACL to 100 for each of those resource types, letting larger organizations attach one web ACL across more services without filing a support ticket.

The bigger update landed on June 29, 2026, when AWS WAF reached general availability for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway, extending the same rule engine to agentic AI workloads. That matters because agent traffic often looks nothing like normal HTTP traffic, and teams building on Bedrock no longer need a separate security layer in front of their agent endpoints.

Every web ACL starts with a budget of 1,500 WAF Capacity Units (WCUs). Each rule and each managed rule group draws from that pool, and exceeding it triggers per-million-request surcharges. AWS keeps its managed rule sets current too: version 1.23 of the Core Rule Set shipped August 28, 2026, and on August 3, 2026 AWS WAF added two Marketplace rule groups from Miggo Security, High Emerging Application Threats and AI/ML Application Protection, priced separately by Miggo. Because AWS WAF is a component and not a front door, it only ever sees the traffic that already reached an attached AWS resource. That single fact drives most of the architectural differences in this comparison.

What Cloudflare WAF Does and Where It Runs

Cloudflare WAF works differently. It inspects traffic the moment a domain’s DNS points at Cloudflare’s nameservers, whether the origin server sits on AWS, on-premises, or anywhere else. The Free plan includes five custom WAF rules and access only to the Free Managed Ruleset. Pro, priced at $20 a month billed annually or $25 a month billed monthly, unlocks the full Cloudflare Managed Ruleset plus the OWASP Core Ruleset and raises the custom rule limit to 20. Business, at $200 a month annual or $250 monthly, adds up to 100 custom rules across five rulesets with full regex matching, a 100% uptime SLA, and Super Bot Fight Mode. Enterprise is quote-based, with published estimates starting near $2,000 a month per site, and it removes the custom rule ceiling entirely while adding API Shield and full Bot Management.

Cloudflare treats the WAF as one layer inside a bundled edge stack that also covers DNS, caching, and DDoS mitigation from a single dashboard, an approach distinct from how the company separates its Workers compute platform from AWS Lambda@Edge. On June 8, 2026, Cloudflare wired live threat-intelligence feeds directly into the WAF rule engine, so newly discovered attack patterns propagate without a manual ruleset push. That pipeline proved its worth five weeks later: on July 17, 2026, Cloudflare shipped emergency block-mode detections for unauthenticated remote code execution and SQL injection flaws under active exploitation in popular web frameworks.

AWS WAF vs Cloudflare WAF: Full Specs Comparison

The table below lines up both platforms across the specs that actually change a buying decision, from deployment model to how each one prices AI agent protection.

SpecAWS WAFCloudflare WAF
Deployment modelAttaches to CloudFront, ALB, API Gateway, AppSync, Cognito, App Runner, Verified AccessDNS-level, in front of any domain regardless of host
Entry price$5 per web ACL/month$0 (Free plan)
Custom rule limitGoverned by 1,500 WCU budget per ACL, expandable5 (Free), 20 (Pro), 100 (Business), unlimited (Enterprise)
Managed rulesetsAWS Managed Rules, Core Rule Set v1.23 (Aug 28, 2026), Marketplace partner rulesFree Managed Ruleset (Free), Cloudflare Managed + OWASP Core Ruleset (Pro+)
Bot managementBot Control: Common and Targeted tiers, billed separatelyBot Fight Mode (Pro), Super Bot Fight Mode (Business), full Bot Management (Enterprise)
AI agent/bot monetizationAI traffic monetization (GA June 15, 2026) at no extra WAF feeNot offered as a native monetization feature
Rate limitingRate-based rules, billed as standard rules ($1/rule/month)Custom expressions, bounded by plan’s rule ceiling
API securityNative integration with API Gateway, AppSync, Verified AccessAPI Shield and mutual TLS (Enterprise only)
DDoS integrationPairs with AWS Shield for volumetric defenseBundled autonomous DDoS mitigation at every plan tier
ML-based detectionMarketplace ML rule groups (e.g. Miggo AI/ML Application Protection)Native WAF ML models processing ~9.5M requests/second globally
Agentic AI workload supportGA for Bedrock AgentCore Gateway (June 29, 2026)No dedicated agent-gateway product as of Sept 2026
SLAStandard AWS service SLA100% uptime SLA on Business and Enterprise
LoggingBilled per log destination type, integrates with CloudWatchIncluded in dashboard analytics, deeper logs on higher tiers

Read down that table and a pattern emerges quickly: almost every AWS WAF row describes something that attaches to a component, while almost every Cloudflare row describes something that applies globally the moment a plan is active. That’s not a flaw in either design, but it explains why teams migrating from AWS to Cloudflare often report the configuration work shrinking, and why teams migrating the other direction often report gaining control they didn’t previously have over exactly which resource gets which rule.

Pricing Breakdown: What Each WAF Actually Costs

AWS WAF prices by component. A web ACL costs $5 a month, prorated hourly. Each rule and each managed rule group added to that ACL costs another $1 a month. Standard request inspection runs $0.60 per million requests. Go over the default 1,500 WCU allocation and AWS adds $0.20 per million requests for every extra 500 WCUs, plus $0.30 per million requests for every additional 16 KB analyzed beyond the default body-inspection limit. Bot Control costs $10 per web ACL per month just to enable, then $1 per million requests for the Common tier (first 10 million free monthly) or $10 per million for Targeted (first 1 million free). Fraud Control follows the same $10-per-ACL subscription plus a tiered per-request schedule that steps down from roughly $1,000 to $50 per million analyzed requests as volume grows.

Cloudflare charges flat, per-domain, per-month, regardless of request volume on Free, Pro, and Business. That distinction alone reshapes the AWS WAF vs Cloudflare WAF decision for high-traffic sites, since AWS bills scale with every million requests while Cloudflare’s published plan pricing stays fixed until an account needs an Enterprise contract.

ScenarioAWS WAF estimated costCloudflare WAF cost
Small site, 1 ACL, 5 rules, ~1M requests/month~$11/month ($5 ACL + $5 rules + $0.60 requests)$0 (Free plan)
Growing app, 1 ACL, 20 rules, ~50M requests/month~$55/month$20-25/month (Pro)
Mid-size platform, 2 ACLs, 50 rules, ~500M requests/month, 4 managed rule groups~$500/month$200-250/month (Business)
Bot Control add-on, Common tier, 20M bot-scored requests~$20/month on top of base ACL costIncluded in Business Super Bot Fight Mode
Enterprise, custom rules unlimited, API Shield, full Bot ManagementScales per-request indefinitelyCustom quote, commonly starting near $2,000/month per site

The crossover point in that table sits somewhere between the growing-app and mid-size rows. Below roughly 20-30 million requests a month, AWS WAF’s metered pricing usually lands cheaper than Cloudflare Pro’s flat $20-25. Past that volume, Cloudflare’s fixed price starts winning by a wider margin every time traffic doubles, since AWS keeps charging $0.60 per million requests with no ceiling. Finance teams budgeting a full year of WAF spend should model both curves against realistic traffic growth rather than comparing a single month’s bill.

Benchmark Data: OWASP Coverage, False Positives, and Latency

Pricing only matters if the WAF actually catches attacks without blocking legitimate users, so independent testing carries real weight in the AWS WAF vs Cloudflare WAF debate. SecureIQLab’s 2025 Cloud WAAP CyberRisk Validation reports scored AWS WAF at a 73.61% OWASP coverage score with a 92.03% False Positive Avoidance score. The companion Cloudflare report from the same test series scored Cloudflare WAF at 87.24% on the identical OWASP methodology, a meaningfully higher detection result, though SecureIQLab’s synthetic attack traffic does not always mirror real production false-positive rates. A separate 2026 benchmark comparison from AIMultiple found Cloudflare’s free plan alone achieved 86-87% overall mitigation, with the trade-off being limited customization and analytics compared to paid tiers.

Cloudflare has also published detailed engineering data on its own ML pipeline. A 2024 optimization effort cut WAF ML model execution time by roughly 82%, from 1,519 microseconds down to 275 microseconds per request, and pre-processing optimizations shaved average request-body processing from 28.19 microseconds to 2.33 microseconds, about 12 times faster. Cloudflare says that pipeline now runs against an average of 9.5 million requests per second globally, and the company frames the savings as recovering roughly 32 years of processing time per day at that scale. Full detail is in Cloudflare’s own engineering writeup.

On raw latency, a 2025 academic study measured Cloudflare’s WAF and security stack adding roughly 25 milliseconds on average (a 22-28ms range depending on configuration), with tuned configurations delivering an 18% drop in overall response time. A separate field comparison of cloud WAFs found Cloudflare and AWS both averaging 25-45 milliseconds globally under normal load, compared to 10-20 milliseconds for on-premises appliances like F5 or Fortinet that lack global points of presence.

MetricSourceAWS WAFCloudflare WAF
OWASP coverage scoreSecureIQLab 2025 Cloud WAAP Validation73.61%87.24%
False Positive AvoidanceSecureIQLab 2025 Cloud WAAP Validation92.03%Not separately published in the same report
Overall mitigation (free tier)AIMultiple 2026 WAF benchmarkNot tested on free tier (AWS has no free WAF plan)86-87%
Average security-layer latency2025 academic Cloudflare study (Sciendo)Not measured in this study~25ms (22-28ms range)
Global cloud-WAF latency2025 Hostomize field comparison25-45ms25-45ms

Bot Management and the New AI Traffic Problem

Bot traffic split into a genuinely new category in 2026: AI agents and crawlers that are not necessarily malicious but still consume bandwidth and API quota without paying for it. AWS moved first here. On June 15, 2026, AWS WAF launched AI traffic monetization inside Bot Control, letting site owners price, meter, and collect payment from AI bots and agents that hit their content and APIs. The feature runs at no additional AWS WAF charge beyond standard Bot Control fees and works at every edge location where a web ACL attaches to CloudFront.

Cloudflare’s bot stack is tiered by plan rather than by traffic type. Pro includes Bot Fight Mode, aimed at blocking obviously automated bad traffic through JavaScript challenges. Business steps up to Super Bot Fight Mode with more configurable thresholds suited to production workloads. Enterprise unlocks full Bot Management, which scores every request and lets teams write policy against that score, tying into API Shield for endpoint-level protection. Neither platform has published a head-to-head bot-detection accuracy benchmark as of September 2026, so the meaningful difference right now is AWS’s monetization angle versus Cloudflare’s graduated blocking controls.

The strategic split matters more than it looks. AWS is betting that publishers want to charge AI crawlers rather than block them outright, treating agent traffic as a new revenue line instead of pure risk. Cloudflare’s roadmap still frames bots primarily as a threat to filter, and monetization tooling is absent from its published Bot Management feature list as of September 2026. Which philosophy fits a given site depends on whether AI agents are seen as customers or as noise, and that’s a business call, not a security one.

Rate Limiting, Custom Rules, and API Security

AWS WAF handles rate limiting through rate-based rules, which behave like any other rule for billing purposes: $1 a month each, plus the WCU they consume against the 1,500-unit budget. That makes rate limiting effectively free to add once a web ACL already exists, but it means teams juggling dozens of rate rules across multiple resources need to track WCU consumption carefully to avoid the overage surcharge.

Cloudflare bakes rate limiting into its custom-rule engine using its own expression syntax, but the plan’s custom-rule ceiling caps how many distinct rate policies a site can run: five on Free, twenty on Pro, a hundred on Business. Enterprise reviewers report ceilings in the hundreds to low thousands of rules, well past what most single applications need. On API security specifically, AWS’s advantage is native integration: as of May 1, 2026, a single web ACL can associate with up to 100 resources across API Gateway, Cognito, AppSync, App Runner, Verified Access, and Amplify. Cloudflare answers with API Shield and mutual TLS, but both live exclusively on the Enterprise tier, which is the plan most small API teams never reach.

Compliance, Logging, and SIEM Integration

Logging is billed and structured differently on each platform, and that difference matters once a security team has to feed WAF events into a SIEM. AWS WAF logs stream to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3, or Amazon Data Firehose, and AWS bills logging separately per destination type rather than folding it into the base web ACL price. That granularity suits teams already running CloudWatch dashboards or piping logs to Splunk through Firehose, since they don’t pay for log delivery paths they don’t use. Cloudflare instead surfaces WAF events inside its own analytics dashboard on every plan, and higher tiers unlock deeper retention plus Logpush destinations that cover S3, Splunk, and Datadog without a separate per-destination fee.

On formal compliance, Cloudflare’s Business plan explicitly advertises PCI support alongside its 100% uptime SLA, a combination smaller merchants often need to close a payment processor’s security questionnaire. AWS WAF instead inherits whatever compliance certifications already apply to the broader AWS account, since it runs as a native AWS service rather than a bolt-on product. Neither vendor publishes a WAF-specific SOC 2 report distinct from their platform-wide attestations, so procurement teams comparing the two on paper compliance still end up asking for the same underlying AWS or Cloudflare enterprise agreement either way.

DDoS Defense in 2025-2026: Record Attacks and Real Responses

DDoS defense is where Cloudflare’s bundled model shows up most clearly. In July 2026, Cloudflare disclosed blocking a 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack fully autonomously, without triggering alerts, human intervention, or any service incident. That single event sits inside a broader pattern documented in Cloudflare’s own quarterly DDoS threat reports: across 2025, Cloudflare mitigated an average of 5,376 DDoS attacks every hour, split between 3,925 network-layer attacks and 1,451 HTTP-layer attacks, the kind that typically require WAF-level application logic rather than pure volumetric filtering. Earlier in the year, Cloudflare’s Q1 2025 report counted roughly 700 hyper-volumetric attacks exceeding 1 Tbps or 1 billion packets per second, averaging about eight a day, and its Q3 2025 report put the total blocked that quarter at 8.3 million DDoS attacks.

AWS approaches this differently by design: AWS WAF handles the application layer while AWS Shield absorbs volumetric and protocol attacks, so DDoS resilience on AWS depends on pairing services correctly rather than getting it bundled by default. For teams that already track infrastructure reliability closely, it’s worth reading how Cloudflare’s own August 2026 outage run played out alongside its DDoS record, since bundling more of the stack into one vendor raises the stakes when that vendor has a bad week.

Market Adoption Signals: Why Cloudflare’s Footprint Looks Bigger

Neither AWS nor Cloudflare publishes a clean market-share percentage split the way analyst firms track categories like CRM or ERP, and this article won’t guess at a number that isn’t published. What is documented is scale of reach rather than share of wallet. Cloudflare’s own network performance data shows it was the fastest provider in 487 of the top 1,000 global networks measured between November 2024 and March 2025, and a separate Birthday Week 2025 benchmark placed Cloudflare second overall among CDNs at 113 milliseconds average latency, just 4.81% (about 5.16ms) behind the fastest provider tested. That kind of number is a rough proxy for how much production traffic already touches Cloudflare’s edge, even though it measures CDN performance rather than a WAF-specific deployment count.

AWS doesn’t publish an equivalent latency leaderboard for WAF specifically, because AWS WAF’s footprint depends on which AWS regions and CloudFront edge locations a given customer already uses, and Amazon reports WAF usage folded into a single broader AWS revenue line rather than as a standalone metric. The practical takeaway for anyone researching AWS WAF vs Cloudflare WAF adoption: Cloudflare’s numbers are easier to find because the company publishes aggressive, dated performance reports as a matter of routine, while AWS WAF’s real-world usage stays largely invisible outside AWS’s own service dashboards.

Rule Syntax Compared: Cloudflare Expressions vs AWS JSON

The two platforms also differ sharply in how engineers actually write rules day to day. AWS WAF rules are defined as structured JSON statements, typically authored through the console, CLI, or infrastructure-as-code templates. A simple rate-based rule looks like this:

{
  "Name": "RateLimitPerIP",
  "Priority": 1,
  "Statement": {
    "RateBasedStatement": {
      "Limit": 2000,
      "AggregateKeyType": "IP"
    }
  },
  "Action": { "Block": {} },
  "VisibilityConfig": {
    "SampledRequestsEnabled": true,
    "CloudWatchMetricsEnabled": true,
    "MetricName": "RateLimitPerIP"
  }
}

Cloudflare uses a compact, single-line expression language instead. The equivalent rate-limiting logic reads closer to plain filtering syntax:

(http.request.uri.path contains "/login") and (rate(ip.src, 1m) > 20)
Action: Block
Duration: 10 minutes

Neither format is objectively better, but they favor different teams. AWS’s JSON statements slot directly into CloudFormation or Terraform pipelines that already manage the rest of an AWS deployment. Cloudflare’s expression syntax is faster to write and read directly in the dashboard, which is part of why reviewers consistently describe Cloudflare as the easier platform to configure without a dedicated security engineer on staff.

Real-World Deployments: Five Examples From 2025 and 2026

Concrete deployment stories are harder to find in public than pricing pages, but several are documented well enough to cite directly. Reading them side by side is more useful than any single benchmark, because they show the two products getting picked for exactly the reasons the specs above would predict.

  • Instawork publicly documented its own migration from Amazon WAF to Cloudflare on its engineering blog in April 2025, citing difficulty setting targeted rate limits in AWS WAF and calling Cloudflare’s rate-limit customization a better fit for its traffic patterns.
  • Bedrock AgentCore Gateway customers gained native AWS WAF protection for agentic AI workloads the moment that integration reached general availability on June 29, 2026, giving teams building AI agents on AWS a rule engine that didn’t previously exist for that traffic type.
  • An unnamed Cloudflare Enterprise customer sat behind the 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack Cloudflare blocked in July 2026. Cloudflare’s own writeup doesn’t disclose the customer, but confirms the attack was mitigated with zero human intervention and zero service incidents.
  • Sites subscribing to Miggo Security’s Marketplace rule groups, added to AWS WAF on August 3, 2026, represent a growing pattern of teams layering AI/ML-specific threat detection on top of AWS’s own managed rules rather than waiting for AWS to build it natively.
  • Organizations under active exploitation of framework-level RCE and SQL injection bugs in July 2026 were protected by Cloudflare’s emergency block-mode rules within roughly 48 hours of the vulnerabilities becoming known, an example of Cloudflare’s threat-intel pipeline reacting faster than a typical patch cycle.

Migration Guide: Switching WAF Providers Without an Outage

Moving from AWS WAF to Cloudflare, or the other direction, is routine work if it’s staged correctly. Skipping the staging steps is how teams end up blocking real customers on launch day.

  1. Export every existing rule, including managed rule group selections and rate-based thresholds, into a spreadsheet or version-controlled file before touching anything.
  2. Recreate the equivalent ruleset on the target platform in count-only or log-only mode so it evaluates every request without blocking traffic.
  3. Run both WAFs in parallel for at least one full traffic cycle, typically seven days, to capture weekday and weekend patterns.
  4. Compare block and allow decisions between the two platforms and flag any request pattern that would be treated differently.
  5. Tune the target ruleset until its decisions match or improve on the current platform’s false-positive rate.
  6. Cut over DNS (for Cloudflare) or resource association (for AWS) during a low-traffic window, with the old WAF still active as a fallback.
  7. Keep the previous WAF running in monitor mode for at least 72 hours post-cutover before decommissioning it.
  8. Update logging and alerting integrations last, since dashboards and SIEM pipelines often break silently during a provider switch.

The most common failure in this process isn’t a technical one. It’s skipping the parallel-run window because the migration is already behind schedule, then discovering on day one that the new ruleset blocks a legitimate integration partner or a payment webhook that never showed up in testing traffic. A second common mistake is copying rule logic literally instead of translating intent, since AWS’s WCU-based rule budgeting and Cloudflare’s rule-count ceiling reward slightly different rule structures for the same security outcome.

Teams running this migration alongside other infrastructure changes should treat it as one part of a wider hardening effort. A WAF swap doesn’t fix upstream problems like cloud IAM misconfiguration, and it doesn’t replace the need for container-level security hardening if your workloads run on Kubernetes behind either WAF.

Which WAF Fits Your Use Case

The right answer depends less on which platform scores higher on a benchmark and more on where your infrastructure already lives and how your traffic behaves. Teams that already split workloads across providers, the pattern covered in our AWS vs Azure vs GCP comparison, tend to gravitate toward Cloudflare by default simply because it doesn’t care which cloud sits behind it.

  • Already deep in AWS (CloudFront, ALB, API Gateway, Bedrock): AWS WAF’s native resource attachment and Bedrock AgentCore Gateway support outweigh the per-request billing complexity.
  • Multi-cloud or origin outside AWS entirely: Cloudflare’s DNS-level model protects a domain regardless of where it’s hosted, with no cloud lock-in.
  • High-volume site with unpredictable traffic spikes: Cloudflare’s flat-rate Business or Enterprise plans avoid the surprise bills that come from AWS’s per-million-request pricing during a traffic spike.
  • Low or highly variable traffic, cost-sensitive: AWS WAF’s pay-as-you-go model can undercut Cloudflare’s flat monthly fee for sites well under a few million requests.
  • Teams needing bundled, autonomous DDoS mitigation: Cloudflare includes this at every tier, while AWS requires pairing WAF with Shield separately.
  • AI agent or Bedrock-based workloads: AWS WAF’s native AgentCore Gateway integration has no direct Cloudflare equivalent as of September 2026.
  • Compliance requirements favoring vendor diversity: Running Cloudflare in front of an AWS-hosted origin avoids putting CDN, DNS, and WAF all under one vendor.

Pros and Cons: AWS WAF vs Cloudflare WAF

Every spec sheet and benchmark in this piece eventually collapses into a short list of trade-offs a team can actually weigh in a planning meeting. The lists below strip out the nuance and leave the parts that change a real decision.

AWS WAF: Pros and Cons

  • Pro: Native integration across CloudFront, ALB, API Gateway, AppSync, and now Bedrock AgentCore Gateway.
  • Pro: Pay-as-you-go pricing that can be cheaper than Cloudflare at low or unpredictable traffic volumes.
  • Pro: AI traffic monetization built into Bot Control at no extra charge beyond standard fees.
  • Con: Per-million-request billing scales unpredictably at high volume, so a jump in traffic means a jump in cost.
  • Con: Lower OWASP coverage score (73.61%) than Cloudflare in SecureIQLab’s 2025 validation report.
  • Con: No native DDoS bundling, requires pairing with AWS Shield separately.

Cloudflare WAF: Pros and Cons

  • Pro: Flat, predictable per-domain pricing regardless of request volume on Free, Pro, and Business.
  • Pro: Higher OWASP coverage score (87.24%) in the same SecureIQLab test series.
  • Pro: Autonomous DDoS mitigation bundled at every plan tier, demonstrated against a 7.3 Tbps attack in July 2026.
  • Con: API Shield and mutual TLS are locked behind the Enterprise tier, out of reach for smaller API teams.
  • Con: Custom rule ceilings on Free, Pro, and Business can force an upgrade sooner than expected for complex rulesets.
  • Con: Enterprise pricing is opaque and quote-based, making budget planning harder than AWS’s published unit prices.

The Verdict: Which WAF Wins on the Numbers

On raw detection numbers, Cloudflare WAF wins: an 87.24% OWASP coverage score against AWS WAF’s 73.61% in the same SecureIQLab 2025 test series, plus autonomous DDoS mitigation bundled into every plan instead of requiring a second service. Cloudflare’s flat, per-domain pricing also removes the billing anxiety that comes with AWS’s per-million-request model once traffic climbs past a few hundred million requests a month, where the worked example in this piece puts AWS WAF near $500 against Cloudflare Business at $200 to $250.

AWS WAF still wins on a narrower but real set of criteria: teams already running CloudFront, ALB, or API Gateway get protection that snaps into their existing AWS security posture without adding a new vendor, and the June 2026 Bedrock AgentCore Gateway integration has no direct Cloudflare equivalent for agentic AI workloads. Low-traffic and highly variable sites can also come out cheaper on AWS’s pay-as-you-go model than on Cloudflare’s flat monthly fee. The practical rule for September 2026: pick Cloudflare WAF by default unless your workload already lives inside AWS or specifically needs Bedrock AgentCore Gateway protection, in which case AWS WAF is the better-integrated choice despite the lower benchmark score.

One more factor belongs in the decision that neither vendor’s marketing page will volunteer: switching cost. Cloudflare’s DNS-first model makes an initial rollout fast, often a single afternoon, but it also means every future domain change routes through Cloudflare’s nameservers. AWS WAF’s per-resource attachment is slower to stand up but easier to remove piece by piece, since dropping a web ACL from one CloudFront distribution doesn’t touch any other service. Teams that expect to re-architect their hosting within the next year or two should weight that reversibility more heavily than either platform’s current benchmark score.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Cloudflare considered a WAF?

Yes. Cloudflare WAF is a full web application firewall product, included in some form on every plan from Free through Enterprise, and it sits at the DNS level in front of a domain rather than attaching to a specific cloud resource.

Which WAF is better for a small startup on a tight budget?

Cloudflare’s Free plan offers a working WAF with five custom rules and the Free Managed Ruleset at no cost, which is usually enough for a low-traffic launch. AWS WAF has no free tier and starts at roughly $6-11 a month once request costs are added.

Can I use AWS WAF and Cloudflare together?

Yes, and some teams do exactly that, running Cloudflare at the DNS layer in front of an AWS-hosted origin protected by AWS WAF on the load balancer. This adds redundancy but also adds cost and complexity, since both platforms need synchronized rule logic to avoid gaps.

Does AWS WAF protect against DDoS attacks?

AWS WAF handles application-layer (Layer 7) filtering rather than volumetric DDoS defense on its own. AWS pairs it with AWS Shield for network and protocol-layer DDoS protection, whereas Cloudflare bundles autonomous DDoS mitigation directly into every WAF plan.

How much does AWS WAF cost for a 500 million request per month site?

Based on AWS’s published unit prices, a site with two web ACLs, 50 rules, 500 million monthly requests, and four managed rule groups runs approximately $500 a month. The equivalent traffic on Cloudflare’s flat-rate Business plan costs $200 to $250 a month.

What is the OWASP coverage score difference between AWS WAF and Cloudflare WAF?

SecureIQLab’s 2025 Cloud WAAP CyberRisk Validation reports scored AWS WAF at 73.61% and Cloudflare WAF at 87.24% on the same OWASP-based testing methodology, giving Cloudflare a meaningfully higher detection rate in that specific test series.

Does Cloudflare WAF support AI agent traffic like AWS WAF does with Bedrock?

Not as a dedicated product. AWS WAF reached general availability for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway protection on June 29, 2026, giving it a native integration for agentic AI workloads that Cloudflare has not matched with an equivalent product as of September 2026.

Is it hard to migrate from AWS WAF to Cloudflare WAF?

Not if it’s staged properly. Export the existing ruleset, rebuild it on Cloudflare in log-only mode, run both platforms in parallel for about a week to compare decisions, then cut over DNS during a low-traffic window while keeping the old WAF live as a fallback for at least 72 hours.

Which WAF is easier to set up for a first-time deployment?

Cloudflare WAF is faster to stand up because it only requires pointing DNS at Cloudflare’s nameservers and turning on a managed ruleset, often finished in under an hour. AWS WAF takes longer to configure since it requires creating a web ACL, choosing rules, and attaching it to the correct CloudFront distribution, load balancer, or API Gateway resource before it protects anything.