Gcore WAAP vs OWASP Coraza WAF

Gcore WAAP protects websites, web applications, and APIs against threats including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and API abuse. It is a SaaS reverse proxy that can sit before a CDN or origin and forward clean traffic onward. Its edge firewall blocks OWASP Top 10 risks, zero-day patterns, and suspicious behavior. Bot Management can admit trusted bots and AI agents, challenge suspicious traffic, and stop abusive automation. API protection includes discovery, schema validation, anomaly detection, and sensitive-data detection. The service also automatically mitigates application-layer DDoS attacks at the edge; Gcore states detection is sub-second. WAAP works with any CDN and supports multi-cloud and hybrid environments, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and customer data centers. Gcore lists 210+ edge PoPs, 200 Tbps of DDoS filtering capacity, and a 99% platform uptime SLA. The Free plan covers one domain and 0.5M requests; Start costs €25 a month for five domains and 1M requests. Prices exclude VAT, and plans have quotas and overage charges.

OWASP Coraza WAF is a free, open-source Web Application Firewall for APIs and web applications. It supports ModSecurity SecLang rulesets and is fully compatible with the OWASP Core Rule Set. That ruleset covers threats including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, code injection, HTTPoxy, Shellshock and scanner or bot activity. Coraza can run as a sidecar, proxy or library in Go, C++ and WebAssembly. Official connectors are listed for NGINX, Envoy, Caddy, Apache APISIX, proxy-wasm, HAProxy, Traefik and libcoraza. Documentation describes extension points for audit loggers, persistence engines, operators, actions and plugins, with examples for GeoIP and a package containing the Core Rule Set and recommended configuration. The Quick Start requires Go 1.24 or later. Platforms listed are API, Linux, macOS and self-hosted. Coraza offers managed rule sets, API protection and bot management. The v3 internals documentation says persistent collections such as IP, SESSION and RESOURCE are not currently supported. Coraza Playground provides a sandbox web interface for testing rules. The Open source plan is listed at free.