ModSecurity vs Bunny Shield
A detailed comparison to help you choose between ModSecurity and Bunny Shield.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
ModSecurity
0 reviews
3.8/5
Bunny Shield
0 reviews
Bunny Shield is rated higher (3.8 vs 3.7). ModSecurity is a free WAF engine that detects and blocks malicious HTTP requests. Operates as a module for major web servers to protect against OWASP Top 10 attacks and custom threats. Bunny Shield is the security layer of Bunny.net: WAF, DDoS mitigation, rate limiting, bot detection, access lists, and upload scanning for sites and APIs served through Bunny's edge network. Free Basic tier; Advanced $9.50/month, Business $99/month.
ModSecurity Open-source web application firewall for Apache, Nginx, and IIS | Bunny Shield DDoS protection and Web Application Firewall for content delivery | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 3.8 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | free | freemium |
| Starting price | Free | Free tier available |
| Best for | Sysadmins and DevOps teams running self-managed web servers who need auditable, on-premises application-layer filtering and have the capacity to tune rules. | Bunny CDN customers — especially UGC and media platforms — who want WAF, bot, and rate-limit protection without a second security vendor |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen sourceself hostable | free tierddos protectioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit ModSecurity → | Visit Bunny Shield → | |
ModSecurity
Pros
- + Free Apache-2.0 WAF engine with 23 years of production deployments behind it
- + OWASP Core Rule Set covers OWASP Top 10 attack classes without application-specific knowledge
- + Actively maintained under OWASP governance with LTS rule branches and coordinated security releases
- + Full control and visibility: custom rules, blocking or detection-only modes, everything on your own servers
- + Broad deployment surface: Apache, nginx, IIS, containers, Debian/Ubuntu packages
Cons
- - Engine alone provides almost no protection — CRS tuning is mandatory skilled work
- - False positives are guaranteed without a detection-only tuning period; not a deploy-and-forget tool
- - libmodsecurity 3.x connector path (nginx/IIS) has matured more slowly than the Apache module
- - No volumetric DDoS protection, no managed option, no SLA, community-only support
Bunny Shield
Pros
- + Free Basic tier is genuinely protective: 71 WAF rules, 25M requests/month, upload scanning included
- + Full published feature matrix with explicit overage rates — pricing clarity above the category norm
- + Runs on the same 119-center edge as Bunny CDN, so protection adds no second network hop
- + Upload scanning for malware and CSAM is rare outside enterprise UGC platforms' tooling
- + API Guardian validates and authenticates API traffic at the edge before it reaches origin
Cons
- - Only protects properties served through Bunny's network — no stand-alone mode
- - Bot mitigation and inspection depth tier-gated: complex bots require the $99/month Business plan
- - Custom WAF rules capped at 10 (Advanced) and 25 (Business); access lists capped by entries
- - Request-based billing keeps metering during attacks unless limits are configured
- - Younger product with less community depth and fewer documented edge cases than Cloudflare's WAF
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