Network and endpoint firewalls operate at a lower stack level than web application firewalls. As the name suggests, WAFs examine attributes at the Application Layer (Layer 7), whereas typical firewalls work at the Network Layer (Layer 3). So, each looks at different characteristics of incoming traffic. Another major difference between these two services is that a typical firewall integrates into the architecture of a network gateway (or computer network interface) but WAFs have a reverse proxy configuration.