No. 22 of 30 ·Web Application Firewall Software

F5 WAF for NGINX

Linux · Self-hosted

Freedom report

One barScore 5.0

Free tierNo free tier on record
Open codeNo open-source code on record
Runs widely1 of 6 device platforms
DocumentedPlans, terms and facts published

F5 WAF for NGINX is ranked #22 of 30 in web application firewall software on Freedom251. It runs on Linux, Self-hosted. There is no free plan. A free trial is offered.

F5 WAF for NGINX plans and pricing

All plans

F5 WAF for NGINX subscription Not published pricing varies by deployment size · covered environments · required features f5.com · 30 Sept 2026

Compared on web application firewall software

Free plan: No
Deployment model: hybrid
Managed rule sets: Yes
API protection: Yes
Bot management: Yes
Rate limiting: Yes

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The record

Purpose: F5 WAF for NGINX is an advanced, lightweight, high-performance web application firewall for applications and APIs.
Core protection: It protects against the OWASP Top 10 and provides HTTP response inspection, protocol compliance, JSON and XML schema validation, meta character checking, and disallowed file-type controls.
Deployment: It supports virtual machine or bare-metal, Docker, and Kubernetes deployments.
NGINX integration: F5 WAF for NGINX runs natively on NGINX Plus and NGINX Ingress Controller and is included in NGINX One premium packages.
Attack signatures: The product includes predefined attack signatures that can be applied to requests and responses.
Bot defense: Bot signatures inspect User-Agent headers and request URIs, and bot defense is enabled by default with header-anomaly detection.
Threat intelligence: Threat campaigns provide frequently updated contextual feeds about active attack campaigns observed by F5 Threat Labs.
Supported systems: Supported operating systems include Alpine Linux 3.22 and 3.24, Amazon Linux 2023, Debian 12 and 13, Oracle Linux 8, RHEL/Rocky Linux 8–10, and Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, and 26.04.
Resource limit: F5 WAF for NGINX supports a maximum of 127 CPU cores.
Ingress integration: With NGINX Ingress Controller, WAF policies can be applied to VirtualServer, VirtualServerRoute, and Ingress resources through Policy resources referencing WAF bundles or bundle sources.
Management API: NGINX Instance Manager provides a REST API for managing WAF policies, log profiles, attack signatures, bot signatures, and threat campaigns across instances.
Support: Installation, troubleshooting, and usage assistance is provided through the MyF5 Customer Portal.
Integration limitation: NGINX subrequest-dependent features such as ExternalAuth, APIKey, remote-JWKS JWT, OIDC, and cache background updates may not function as expected when used with F5 WAF for NGINX on the same route.
Current version: The latest documented F5 WAF for NGINX version is 5.15.0.

Where it ranks on Freedom251

Best Web Application Firewall Software in 2026#22 of 30

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Sources

docs.nginx.com/waf/fundamentals/overview· checked 30 Sept 2026
docs.nginx.com/waf/policies/attack-signatures/· checked 30 Sept 2026
docs.nginx.com/waf/policies/bot-signatures/· checked 30 Sept 2026
docs.nginx.com/waf/policies/threat-campaigns/· checked 30 Sept 2026
docs.nginx.com/waf/fundamentals/technical-specificatio· checked 30 Sept 2026
docs.nginx.com/nginx-ingress-controller/integrations/a· checked 30 Sept 2026
docs.nginx.com/nginx-instance-manager/waf-integration/· checked 30 Sept 2026
docs.nginx.com/waf/support/· checked 30 Sept 2026
f5.com/go/faq/nginx-faq· checked 30 Sept 2026