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F5
Delivering and securing every app and API across your data centre, the cloud and the edge, now including AI apps— F5’s Application Delivery and Security Platform, sold as BIG-IP boxes and Virtual Editions, the Distributed Cloud SaaS and NGINX, and how each piece is licensed. This hub covers twelve F5 products.
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The company, at a glance
Quick answer
Twelve intel pages. Application delivery, app and API security, zero trust access, network firewall, multicloud networking and AI security.
F5’s line, product by product — every linked card is a full intel page, from the BIG-IP load balancer, WAF, access and firewall modules to Distributed Cloud WAAP, bots and APIs, NGINX One and the two AI security products.
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
The load balancer at the core of F5’s platform.
Load balancing, traffic steering, health monitoring and SSL offload on rSeries, VELOS or a Virtual Edition, perpetual or subscription.
F5 WAF for BIG-IP
App-layer protection on the box you already run.
Behavioural analytics, proactive bot defence and app-layer encryption of sensitive data, on BIG-IP hardware or a Virtual Edition.
F5 BIG-IP Zero Trust Access
Formerly APM: access, SSO and VPN on BIG-IP.
A per-request identity-aware proxy, per-app and IPsec VPN, SAML, OAuth and OIDC federation and Intune posture checks, all self-hosted.
F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator
Decrypt once, then feed every security tool.
Decrypts inbound and outbound TLS, hybrid PQC ciphers included, and chains it to IPS, DLP, WAF and firewalls; the web gateway is extra.
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager
A full-proxy firewall in front of your apps.
Stateful firewall, behavioural DDoS mitigation, IPS and an SSH proxy on BIG-IP or VIPRION; a data-centre box, not a branch NGFW.
F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP
WAF, DDoS, bot and API rules as a service.
Essentials covers signature WAF, L3–4 DDoS and basic bot defence; Enterprise adds behavioural analysis, schema validation and masking.
F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense
Tells trusted humans, bots and AI agents apart.
Real-time detection of malicious bots and AI agents, deployed through a BIG-IP connector or run as a managed service; quoted only.
F5 API Security
Finds every API, then guards it at runtime.
Discovery from code repositories, traffic and client crawling, OWASP API Top 10 detection and inline blocking; on-prem edition too.
Distributed Cloud Multicloud Networking
Links apps across clouds without public exposure.
Network Connect builds an L3 overlay across clouds and sites, App Connect links services privately, App Stack runs managed Kubernetes.
F5 NGINX One
One package for NGINX on VMs and Kubernetes.
NGINX Plus, F5 WAF for NGINX, the Ingress Controller, Gateway Fabric and the NGINX One Console; PhonePe fronts UPI with NGINX Plus.
F5 AI Guardrails
Policy between users, models and agents.
Blocks prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage and harmful output for any model, in public cloud, private cloud or air-gapped sites.
F5 AI Red Team
Continuous attack testing for AI apps.
Swarms of attack agents test models and apps and feed findings into AI Guardrails; built on F5’s 2025 acquisition of CalypsoAI.
BIG-IP DNS
Platform & engineAuthoritative DNS and global server load balancing (GSLB) with DNS DDoS resilience, part of F5’s Enterprise DNS family beside Distributed Cloud DNS. It answers for your own domains; it is not a protective DNS filter, so it is not compared with secure web and DNS products
F5 Workforce AI Security
Platform & engineDiscovers, classifies and governs employees’ use of AI tools by reading mirrored network traffic, with no agents or browser extensions, and redacts sensitive data. It arrived with F5’s purchase of SurePath AI, closed on 15 June 2026 for $50.1M
F5 Distributed Cloud DDoS Mitigation
Platform & engineA separately sold DDoS service on the Distributed Cloud network. F5 publishes no scrubbing capacity or centre list and no product video, so TechBag covers DDoS on the Advanced Firewall Manager and Distributed Cloud WAAP pages for now
F5 AI Gateway
Platform & engineA gateway for model and MCP traffic, part of the AI Security Platform announced in June 2026. Its product page still invites sign-ups for early access, so TechBag does not treat it as generally available or page it yet
rSeries and VELOS hardware
Platform & engineF5’s current appliance (rSeries) and chassis (VELOS) platforms that BIG-IP modules run on. They are platforms, not products in their own right, so they are covered on the Local Traffic Manager page, where Airtel’s VELOS deployment sits
F5 sells 2 of the products TechBag carries in Network Security & SASE. The Network Security & SASE guide shows how the category splits and which part is yours. →
Also sold in DevOps (1 product).
Why “deliver it and secure it in one place” is the whole story
Most organisations bought a load balancer, then a WAF, then an access gateway, often from F5 and often as separate projects. F5 now sells them as one platform, and lets you host it on BIG-IP boxes, rent it as Distributed Cloud, or run it as NGINX software. The catch: self-hosted BIG-IP means you own the patching, and 2025–26 brought a source-code theft and exploited access-tier flaws.
F5 BIG-IP
Modules such as LTM, WAF, Zero Trust Access, SSL Orchestrator and AFM on rSeries, VELOS, VIPRION or Virtual Editions in any major cloud.
F5 Distributed Cloud
WAAP, bot defence, API security and multicloud networking run as a service, with PoPs in Mumbai and Chennai announced in December 2022.
F5 NGINX Enterprise
NGINX Plus, F5 WAF for NGINX, the Ingress Controller and Gateway Fabric for VMs and Kubernetes, managed from the NGINX One Console.
F5 AI Security Platform
AI Guardrails, AI Red Team, Workforce AI Security and the early-access AI Gateway, deployable on-premises, air-gapped or in public cloud.
Start with where it runs — your boxes, F5’s cloud or your clusters — then pick the modules.
Peer & market recognition
Every claim on this hub traces to one of these public signals.
Market Shaper, AI Application Security 2026
an Emerging Market Quadrant, which is not a Magic Quadrant; F5 announced the placement in October 2026
Leader, Web Application and API Security 2025
Leadership Compass dated 25 August 2025, the report that covers Distributed Cloud WAAP’s market
Leader, GenAI Defense 2025
Leadership Compass dated 2 December 2025, cited on the AI Guardrails and AI Red Team pages
Leader, WAAP Enterprise Platforms 2024
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Web Application and API Protection Enterprise Platforms 2024
Representative vendor, Cloud WAAP 2026
Market Guide of 8 June 2026; a Market Guide lists vendors without ranking them, and no WAAP Magic Quadrant is current
Acquired CalypsoAI for $145.2M
closed on 26 September 2025, per F5’s 10-Q; the AI Guardrails and AI Red Team products are built on it
BIG-IP source-code theft, disclosed Oct 2025
a nation-state-affiliated actor, in CISA’s words, took part of the source code and data on undisclosed flaws; CISA issued ED 26-01
Exploited access-tier flaws in 2026
CVE-2025-53521 and CVE-2026-94127 (OAuth Authorization Server setups only); BIG-IP 15.1 and 16.1 are past end of support
The company in six figures
See the platform, hear the pitch
But What Does F5 Do?
A February 2025 explainer of what F5 sells and where it sits between users and applications.
Introducing the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform
F5’s February 2025 launch of ADSP, the platform pitch that now frames BIG-IP, Distributed Cloud and NGINX.
Converging application delivery and security into a single platform | AppWorld 2026
A March 2026 AppWorld clip on folding delivery and security into one platform; a short pitch, not a demo.
Where F5 sits — the grids
Two company-level views you won’t find on any vendor site — tap any dot for the rationale. The category-level grid lives on the product page.
F5 Across Its Solution Areas
Each dot is a F5 solution area: competitive position vs category momentum.
LTM and NGINX are the base of the line; systems revenue rose 32% in the quarter to June 2026, and Airtel runs BIG-IP on VELOS.
Self-Hosted Options × Delivery and Security Breadth
How much of each vendor’s app security you can run on infrastructure you own vs how much app delivery and protection it sells together.
Load balancing, WAF, access, TLS inspection and firewalling on boxes and VMs you host, plus a SaaS layer and NGINX; quoted outside AWS Marketplace.
Positions are TechBag’s illustrative synthesis of public review-platform standings and vendor documentation — not a reproduction of any analyst graphic. Verify before relying on it.
New to this? Learn it properly.
Zero-jargon starting points, in reading order. Each links into the deep education on the product page.
Where should you start with F5?
Answer three questions; we’ll point you at the right starting product. No email required — this isn’t that kind of quiz.
1. What problem is forcing the decision?
2. Where must it run?
3. Who will own it?
Twelve products, three families
BIG-IP runs on boxes and VMs you host, Distributed Cloud is F5’s SaaS, and NGINX is software for VMs and Kubernetes. Pick the family first.
Read →BIG-IP WAF or Distributed Cloud?
F5 WAF for BIG-IP sits on your own hardware or VE; Distributed Cloud WAAP runs as a service, with PoPs in Mumbai and Chennai.
Read →Names that changed
APM is now BIG-IP Zero Trust Access, Advanced WAF is F5 WAF for BIG-IP, and NGINX App Protect is F5 WAF for NGINX. Old quotes use old names.
Read →After the 2025 source-code theft
Check every BIG-IP train against the 2026 exploited flaws, retire 15.1 and 16.1, and confirm whether Zero Trust Access runs an OAuth server.
Read →The one public price
NGINX Plus Standard costs $0.50 an hour on AWS Marketplace in software fees, before EC2; everything else at F5 is quoted.
Read →Where F5 fits in network security
The Network Security & SASE category compares firewalls, zero trust access and secure web products, where AFM and Zero Trust Access compete.
Read →The acronym decoder
Every term on these pages, in one place- ADC
- Application delivery controller: a load balancer that also offloads TLS and steers traffic.
- ADSP
- F5’s Application Delivery and Security Platform, its name for the whole line.
- WAF
- Web application firewall: blocks injection, cross-site scripting and similar web attacks.
- WAAP
- Web app and API protection: WAF, DDoS, bot and API defences sold as one service.
- Virtual Edition (VE)
- BIG-IP software running as a VM on a hypervisor or in a public cloud.
- Identity-aware proxy
- A gateway that checks user, device and context on every request to an app.
- TLS orchestration
- Decrypting traffic once and passing it through a chain of inspection tools.
- GSLB
- Global server load balancing: DNS answers that send users to the healthiest site.
- PoP
- Point of presence: a site where a SaaS provider receives and inspects traffic.
- FCP
- Flex Consumption Program: F5’s licence pool drawn down across BIG-IP modules.
- AI guardrails
- Runtime rules that screen prompts and model output for attacks and leaks.
- AI red teaming
- Attacking your own models and agents on purpose to find weaknesses first.
Buy it like you’ve done this before
The procurement playbook TechBag runs with IT buyers — steps, licensing cheat-sheet, and the pitfalls that cost quarters.
Pick the family before the module
Decide what you host and what you rent: BIG-IP boxes or VEs, Distributed Cloud as a service, or NGINX software on your own clusters.
Size boxes, packages or hours
BIG-IP is quoted per appliance, chassis or VE; Distributed Cloud by Essentials or Enterprise package; NGINX Plus by the hour on AWS Marketplace.
Choose the licence model
BIG-IP comes perpetual, by subscription, pay-as-you-go on cloud marketplaces or through the Flex Consumption Program across several modules.
Audit versions and exposure
Move 15.1 and 16.1 to a supported train, apply the 2026 fixes, and disconnect unsupported boxes, as CISA ED 26-01 required of US agencies.
Check where traffic is handled
BIG-IP and NGINX stay in your data centre. For Distributed Cloud, confirm which services the Mumbai and Chennai PoPs actually serve.
Get it priced in rupees
F5 publishes no price outside AWS Marketplace. TechBag scopes the family, modules and licence model and quotes the total in INR with GST.
The licensing cheat-sheet
| Product | Licensing model | How you enter | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager | Per appliance, chassis or VE · perpetual, subscription, pay-as-you-go or FCP | Quote; free trial | Load balancing |
| F5 WAF for BIG-IP | BIG-IP module on hardware or VE · licensing unit not published | Quote; trial on request | On-prem WAF |
| BIG-IP Zero Trust Access | BIG-IP module · perpetual, subscription, marketplace or enterprise agreement | Quote | Self-hosted access |
| BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator | BIG-IP hardware or VE · Secure Web Gateway Services is an add-on | Quote | TLS decryption |
| BIG-IP AFM | BIG-IP module on appliance, VIPRION or VE | Quote | Data-centre firewall |
| Distributed Cloud WAAP | Essentials or Enterprise package a year · or AWS pay-as-you-go | $3.704/hr base (AWS) | SaaS WAAP |
| Distributed Cloud Bot Defense | Separate SKU · BIG-IP connector or managed SaaS | Quote | Bot and agent abuse |
| F5 API Security | Distributed Cloud SaaS or on-prem Local Edition | Quote | API discovery |
| Multicloud Networking | Subscription or FCP · Network Connect, App Connect, App Stack | Quote; free trial | Cross-cloud links |
| F5 NGINX One | Package of NGINX Plus, WAF, Ingress, Gateway Fabric and console | $0.50/hr Plus (AWS) | NGINX estates |
| F5 AI Guardrails | Cloud, private cloud or air-gapped deployment | Quote | Runtime AI policy |
| F5 AI Red Team | Public cloud or OpenShift operator on-premises | Quote | AI attack testing |
f5.com publishes no list prices. The only public figures are AWS Marketplace software fees, before compute: NGINX Plus Standard $0.50 an hour (Developer $0.14) and a Distributed Cloud pay-as-you-go base of $3.704 an hour. BIG-IP is quoted per box, chassis or VE. TechBag gets the quote itemised in INR with GST.
Five pitfalls that cost buyers quarters
Reading a marketplace fee as the price
The AWS Marketplace hourly rates are software fees on AWS only, before compute. They say nothing about a BIG-IP appliance or an annual package.
Running BIG-IP 15.1 or 16.1
Both are past end of support and appear on the 2026 exploited-flaw lists. Plan the move to 17.1, 17.5 or 21.x before renewing anything.
Treating AFM as a branch NGFW
AFM protects data-centre apps. It has no SD-WAN, no SASE and no published inspected throughput, so branch firewalls need another product.
Assuming every SaaS service runs in India
F5 announced Mumbai and Chennai PoPs in 2022. Whether bot defence or DDoS scrubbing is served there is unconfirmed, so get it in writing.
Quoting the old product names
APM, Advanced WAF and NGINX App Protect have been renamed. Check that a renewal quote maps to the current SKU, not a retired line item.
The evaluation kit
Each intel page carries an 8-question vendor checklist and a value calculator:
Skip the homework entirely
Bring your requirements and current tool bills — a TechBag advisor models the whole decision for you.
Book a discovery call →The forces shaping this market
Four trends with momentum scores (TechBag’s read of analyst and market signals) — and what each means for your next decision.
Category momentum — estimated market growth
Illustrative CAGR synthesis**TechBag’s illustrative estimate, not a quoted analyst figure. The takeaway: buyers are moving security into the same layer that delivers their apps, and AI apps are the newest thing to protect — which is why F5 now sells delivery, app and API security and AI security as one platform.
Delivery and security in one platform
F5 launched ADSP in February 2025 and reported product revenue up 19% in the quarter to June 2026, its eighth straight double-digit quarter.
What it means for you
Price the load balancer and the WAF together, not as two projects.
A hardware refresh cycle
Systems revenue rose 32% to $240M in the quarter to June 2026, ahead of software at 7%.
What it means for you
Compare a new appliance with a VE before ageing boxes force the choice.
Securing AI apps and staff
F5 bought CalypsoAI in September 2025 and SurePath AI in June 2026, then launched its AI Security Platform.
What it means for you
Map who builds AI apps and who uses AI tools before buying controls.
Patch cadence after the breach
CISA ED 26-01 set a one-week patch deadline in October 2025, and two Zero Trust Access flaws were exploited in 2026.
What it means for you
Budget for patching and version upgrades, not just licences.
Questions buyers ask about F5
Ready to shortlist F5?
Open any of the twelve intel pages for the deep dive, or let a TechBag advisor build the case with you — BIG-IP, Distributed Cloud or NGINX, the modules and licence model to buy, and the versions to patch first, quotes, trials, GST invoicing and lifecycle support included.
Stats, positions and figures are illustrative syntheses of public materials; verify before purchase.