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Imperva Application Security Platform vs Qualys VMDR comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.1
Cloudflare improves performance, security, and financial outcomes with affordable plans, enhancing user satisfaction and operational efficiency significantly.
Sentiment score
6.2
Imperva Application Security delivers cost savings, protection, and efficiency, benefiting sectors prone to cyberattacks, despite varied ROI perceptions.
Sentiment score
7.0
Qualys VMDR enhances ROI by streamlining management, improving compliance, reducing vulnerabilities, saving time, and minimizing breaches effectively.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
Owner at Hga consulting
They know how much money they are losing while the system is down, so by increasing the possibility of not having a down website or web application, return on investment can be calculated easily.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Regarding return on investment, ROI, I can say it is noticeable with Imperva Application Security Platform.
Senior Presales Consultant at Techlab security
We saw a return on investment through significant savings in time, money, and resources.
System Admin at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
Cloudflare's customer service is praised for promptness, but technical support feedback varies, especially favoring Enterprise tier users.
Sentiment score
6.9
Imperva's customer service is praised for expertise and professionalism, but some report delays, especially with lower-level support.
Sentiment score
6.6
Qualys VMDR support is responsive and helpful, but users note occasional delays and suggest better response time and depth.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
Owner at Hga consulting
We use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds.
General Manager at bKash Limited
I would rate the technical support of Imperva DDoS as ten.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
My experience with technical support from Imperva Application Security Platform was good when I reached out to them.
Senior Presales Consultant at Techlab security
We usually get on calls with tech support, and they are very helpful.
Works at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees
The response time takes a while.
Security Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The technical support provided by Qualys is pretty good.
System Admin at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Users praise Cloudflare's scalability, flexibility, and seamless tier transitions for maintaining high performance under increasing traffic and demands.
Sentiment score
7.6
Imperva Application Security Platform is scalable and flexible, though some find cost and on-premises compatibility challenging.
Sentiment score
7.9
Qualys VMDR is highly scalable, supporting numerous assets efficiently with customizable management and seamless cloud-based architecture.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
Independent Consultant at Unaikui
99% of customers are using the cloud version of Imperva DDoS protection, so they just purchase the new license and scale as needed.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Scalability depends on the license and the number of assets being monitored.
System Admin at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Qualys VMDR can handle scalability, although increasing the inventory can raise the licensing costs.
Information Security Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Qualys VMDR's scalability is good, and the customer support is good.
Cyber Security Solution Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Cloudflare is generally stable and reliable, with some initial setup challenges but excellent performance and positive user feedback.
Sentiment score
7.9
Most users find Imperva Application Security Platform stable and reliable, with minor, quickly resolved issues, rating it highly.
Sentiment score
7.9
Qualys VMDR is highly stable, reliable, and effective, with minimal downtime and challenges mostly due to user-side issues.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
Independent Consultant at Unaikui
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
It is also a stable product without much glitch or downtime.
Senior Presales Consultant at Techlab security
The stability of Imperva DDoS is very good, as it seems they have a lot of servers around the world.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Qualys VMDR is stable.
Cyber Security Solution Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare needs enhancements in speed, support, reliability, pricing, and documentation, while expanding integration, security, and analytics capabilities.
Imperva Application Security Platform needs interface enhancements, improved reliability, better support, refined features, simpler integration, and advanced analytics.
Qualys VMDR needs improved support, efficient reporting, UI, asset notifications, reduced tool dependency, better pricing, and comprehensive resources.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Managed Services Manager at Adapture Technology Group
Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements.
General Manager at bKash Limited
There are some performance considerations when it comes to dynamic content that involves fetching data from databases or using APIs.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
Maybe Imperva DDoS could use endpoints to get information about the attacks before they commence from the endpoint level or establish cooperation with endpoint vendors to share this information.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Regarding return on investment, ROI, I can say it is noticeable with Imperva Application Security Platform.
Senior Presales Consultant at Techlab security
It does not automate patching unless the patch management module is purchased separately.
System Admin at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
If AI features were integrated, it could enhance the capabilities significantly.
Information Security Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
One area where Qualys VMDR can be improved is the missing feature for deploying agents for over 1,000 assets, as we need to do it manually.
Cyber Security Solution Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Cloudflare cost-effective, with valuable upgrades and competitive pricing, despite unclear enterprise price lists.
Imperva's platform offers competitive enterprise pricing with advanced features, but licensing and costs vary by project requirements.
Qualys VMDR pricing is high for small businesses but offers flexibility, discounts, and comprehensive features for larger enterprises.
I find it to be cheap.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would rate the pricing of Imperva DDoS as five, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
I would rate the pricing between seven to eight out of ten.
System Admin at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
I have a notion that Qualys might be more expensive than Rapid7.
Information Security Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Qualys offers better pricing and is feature-packed compared to other tools.
Works at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare provides caching, DDoS protection, and CDN services with enhanced security features, making it vital for optimized web performance.
Imperva Application Security Platform provides robust, user-friendly security with DDoS protection, threat intelligence, and compliance-focused features.
Qualys VMDR offers user-friendly management, real-time insights, and powerful integrations, significantly improving vulnerability prioritization and remediation efficiency.
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Most of our DNS records that are presented to the internet are proxied whenever possible, providing another layer of defense from our perspective.
Senior Security Engineer at ManpowerGroup
I have utilized Imperva's Intelligent Traffic Filtering feature. This feature helps me understand how the attack is progressing and what is happening inside the requests to our website.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
I believe the reputational analysis in Imperva Application Security Platform is effective for blocking security threats before impact.
Senior Presales Consultant at Techlab security
The prioritization of vulnerabilities has improved our remediation efforts by around thirty to thirty-five percent.
Works at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees
It impacts my workflow overall, with the patch management features as it has the missing patches listed in detail, making it easier to get a comprehensive report and providing some dashboards that offer visual representation.
JMS, RPSG Ventures Limited at RP Sanjiv Goenka Group
Qualys VMDR's continuous monitoring capabilities help us respond to emergent threats by enabling my team to reach out to the security engineers whenever there is any detection of a vulnerability, informing them about it, and creating an incident.
Soc Lead & Edr Administration at Persistent Systems
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (10th)
Imperva Application Securit...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
CDN (2nd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Bot Management (1st), API Security (2nd)
Qualys VMDR
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (3rd), Vulnerability Management (3rd), Configuration Management Databases (3rd), Container Security (9th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Imperva Application Security Platform8.2%
Cloudflare16.6%
Arbor DDoS9.3%
Other65.9%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Qualys VMDR5.0%
Wiz6.6%
Tenable Nessus5.1%
Other83.3%
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
reviewer1247523 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Solution ensures website availability and proactive threat mitigation
Over the seven years, the most valuable features of Imperva DDoS that I have found are related to DDoS attacks, which are a group of attacks, and not all of them can be resolved on the endpoint level before the website. Using the web firewall before the website is a common use case to protect against malicious requests to the website. I have utilized Imperva's Intelligent Traffic Filtering feature. This feature helps me understand how the attack is progressing and what is happening inside the requests to our website. It allows me to granularly grant or deny access to certain parts of our website. This helps when we know our customers and the types of requests that can be sent from them, enabling us to block some malicious requests. Imperva DDoS has User Behavior Analytics and Threat Intelligence on its board, and this helps us to be protected proactively. Imperva DDoS connects to its database of threats, storing whole information about attacks all over the world in one simple engine. Everyone can use this feature, which can connect to this engine and get information about what is going on at the world level. That is the way to be protected at the company's level. The integration capabilities of Imperva DDoS are very easy and simple. We can run it in 2 hours.
Vaibhav Ghule - PeerSpot reviewer
Soc Lead & Edr Administration at Persistent Systems
Continuous risk-based monitoring has strengthened incident response and vulnerability prioritization
I haven't explored Qualys VMDR's vulnerability lifecycle automation yet. One of my analysts mentioned that queries lack grouping operators in Qualys VMDR. From my experience, I would appreciate improvements in the query options in Qualys VMDR, specifically in the query-building process where I would need more features and operators. Additionally, we have been facing issues with Qualys on the cloud level. We cannot download the configuration profile from the cloud agent, and it is showing a pending action for download. During 2025, we noticed outages of Qualys a couple of times. I want to mention that there is an issue with receiving timely RCA deliveries. While this is not necessarily about the tool, it relates to support. The support has not been very responsive, and we are receiving RCAs a little delayed whenever we raise support cases or communicate with the TAMs. Additionally, the UI has a slight latency, which I and my team have experienced. They have also reported this latency issue when navigating through different pages.
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Expert with 51-200 employees
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business84
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise61
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise70
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
Which Web Application Firewall (WAF) would you recommend? R&S or Imperva?
Imperva is a strong choice, given their security focus and ongoing R&D into the product in areas such as bot mana...
What do you like most about Imperva Incapsula?
We use Imperva DDoS to stop DDoS attacks and reduce the amount of unwanted queries against web services or web scraping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Imperva DDoS?
The pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Imperva DDoS are reasonable for the amount of technical capabilities provi...
What do you like most about Qualys VMDR?
I like that we have many scanners and channels that don't overload. It helps us scan and track easily. Also, the tagg...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qualys VMDR?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that we can consider both time and money saved.
What needs improvement with Qualys VMDR?
I haven't explored Qualys VMDR's vulnerability lifecycle automation yet. One of my analysts mentioned that queries la...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
Qualys VM, QualysGuard VM, Qualys Asset Inventory, Qualys Container Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Agrokor Group, American Specialty Health, American State Bank, Arval, Life:), Axway, Bank of the West, Blueport Commerce, BSkyB, Brinks, CaixaBank, Cartagena, Catholic Health System, CEC Bank, Cegedim, CIGNA, Clickability, Colby-Sawyer College, Commercial Bank of Dubai, University of Utah, eBay Inc., ING Singapore, National Theatre, OTP Bank, Sodexo, WebEx
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: February 2026.
882,961 professionals have used our research since 2012.