BBQ Firewall vs Nivoli Edge

BBQ Firewall

Model: Freemium (Free tier + paid licenses with lifetime option)

Nivoli Edge

Model: Free GPL plugin; managed edge metered on image transforms (cached re-serves unlimited)

BBQ Firewall

• 7G/8G Request Filtering

  Regex-based pattern matching against incoming URIs, query strings, user agents, and referrers. Based on over a decade of refinement by Jeff Starr.

• SQL Injection Protection

  Blocks common SQL injection patterns including UNION, SELECT, eval(), and base64-encoded payloads.

• Directory Traversal Protection

  Catches path traversal attempts, null byte injection, and requests for sensitive system files.

• Bad Bot Blocking

  Filters known malicious user agents and referrer spam patterns.

• Request Method Scanning

  Checks all HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) against firewall rules.

• Customizable Patterns

  Add, edit, or remove firewall patterns to fine-tune protection for your specific site (Pro feature).

• Block Statistics

  Visual bar graphs showing hit counts per pattern to measure firewall effectiveness (Pro feature).

• Email Alerts

  Receive notifications when requests are blocked (Pro feature).

Nivoli Edge

• Full-Page Edge Caching

  Caches whole pages on the Cloudflare node nearest each visitor, tagged with Surrogate-Keys so one post save purges only the affected pages via stale-while-revalidate.

• Asset URL Versioning

  Gives stylesheets, scripts and fonts addresses that change on purge, so browsers pick up updated files immediately instead of serving stale ones for up to a week.

• Edge Image Optimization

  Rewrites images at the WordPress filter boundary and transforms them on the fly via Cloudflare Image Resizing: right-sized per device, WebP or AVIF per browser.

• Origin Shield

  When the origin errors or stops responding, serves the last good cached copy for up to 7 days, with email alerts when the shield engages and when the server recovers.

• Pre-PHP Security Shields

  Seven shields enforced at the edge before WordPress boots: stray-.php 404s, wp-admin IP lock, login rate limiting, AI-crawler blocking, login country lock, XML-RPC 410, security headers pack.

• Cookieless Audience Analytics

  Measures pageviews, countries, referrers and devices at the edge, no JavaScript snippet, no cookies and no consent banner; bots counted separately.

• Edge URL Rules

  Answers dead routes with cached 410s and maps redirects from the edge with per-rule fired counts; one-click block from the error log.

• Surgical Purge

  Dispatches purge requests non-blocking by Surrogate-Key tags on save, delete and comment events; purge triggers can be locked to your own IPs.

• Coverage Audit & Repair

  Weekly re-run measures the optimized share and emails on regression; the runtime misses log groups uncovered images into one-click rules; fake-image scan repairs HTML-disguised-as-JPG files.

• Broken & Heavy Image Tools

  404 inbox from real edge failures, where-used lookups with edit links, a heaviest-images list with one-click Tinify shrink, and a scan for images that never load.