Fastly earns seventh consecutive Gartner choice for cloud WAAP
Fastly has been named a 2025 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP), receiving high ratings in customer reviews and maintaining its streak as the only vendor to earn this recognition for seven consecutive years.
The Gartner Peer Insights platform hosts reviews, posts, ratings, surveys, and other user-generated content from enterprise IT professionals and customers who have implemented different technology solutions.
As of 31 July 2025, Fastly achieved an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars from 130 verified reviews, according to the platform.
Customer feedback
Several key reviews contributed to Fastly's recognition this year. A Technology Director from the media industry stated:
"Fastly has been a long-term, reliable partner to our firm and has been evolving the product to solve our emerging challenges. Working with the Fastly team has always been a pleasure and their technology offering is top shelf, making our teams more productive and providing capabilities for our systems that enable us to provide a seamless experience to our customers."
Another review, provided by a Senior Director in the software industry, commented on the support Fastly delivers:
"The Fastly team is committed to the delivery of excellent products and services. They address real-world challenges in a simplified but sophisticated fashion -- offering easy to use platforms to tackle some of the most complex security challenges. The Fastly sales and support teams bring to the table experts who take time to understand each customers' unique set of challenges and find fast and robust solutions to help them through any situation encountered. Fastly exemplifies the true definition of being a technology partner you can count on."
In a separate review, a Director of Software Engineering from the retail sector highlighted the benefits of Fastly's Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF):
"We have a strong relationship with the Fastly team that helped to set up and enhance our defences. Our ecomm platform is heavily targeted by bots and using the Next-Gen WAF gives us ways to react quickly and protect the back end services."
Company response
Kim Ogletree, Chief Customer Officer at Fastly, acknowledged the feedback from users and outlined the continued efforts in service development. Ogletree said:
"We continue to be inspired by the positive feedback our customers share about how effectively Fastly's Next-Gen WAF advances their security initiatives. Earning this recognition from our customers for seven consecutive years is an honour as we continue innovating our WAAP portfolio, including DDoS and large-scale attack mitigation, (AI) Bot Management, API security and protection, account takeover prevention using unique deception techniques within our Next-Gen WAF, and shared threat intelligence through our Network Learning Exchange."
Understanding WAAP
Gartner categorises cloud web application and API protection (WAAP) as a group of security solutions that defend web applications and APIs from a wide range of cyber attacks, regardless of where they are hosted.
According to Gartner, "Core capabilities are web application firewalls (WAFs), distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, protection against advanced API attacks and automated (bot) traffic management. A cloud WAAP solution must incorporate all four core capabilities within the same offering."
The recent Gartner Peer Insights analysis of the WAAP market included 1,238 reviews and ratings published in the 18 months leading up to July 2025. The methodology for the Customer's Choice distinction involves three factors weighted equally: review volume, user willingness to recommend, and market coverage based on industry, company size, and region. Only those vendors that meet or exceed the market average User Interest and Adoption Score advance to the top quadrant, which represents the Customer's Choice selection.
Fastly first appeared in this segment as Signal Sciences in 2019 and 2020. Following Fastly's acquisition of Signal Sciences in 2020, the company has continued to be consistently recognised by Gartner Peer Insights under the cloud WAAP category in various annual market reports.
Gartner's disclaimer notes that Peer Insights content reflects the opinions of individual end users based on their experiences and does not represent statements of fact, nor does Gartner endorse any vendor, product, or service included.
