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AWS Shield vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (10th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (15th)
AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
147
Ranking in other categories
CDN (2nd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (1st), Bot Management (1st), API Security (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 12.9%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 2.9%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 8.2%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare12.9%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.2%
AWS Shield2.9%
Other76.0%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

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.
Pranav Telang - PeerSpot reviewer
DGM at Airtel Digital
Has enabled multi-layered threat mitigation but still lacks deeper visibility for advanced application attacks
AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods. It does not provide inherent protection against more sophisticated layer 7 attacks such as HTTP floods. In such cases, integration with WAF is necessary, which results in additional costs for customers. To protect layer 7, layer 4, and layer 3, customers must implement both solutions. The service also has difficulties with static detection thresholds, which may not be sensitive enough to detect smaller application-specific attacks. While AWS Shield is a key security service, AWS should enhance their expert support with 24/7 response for complex attacks, which is currently limited.
reviewer2818155 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Associate at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Application protection has improved and reporting and dashboards still need refinement
I believe Imperva Application Security Platform should have a more interactive wizard. While the dashboard is good, it could be more eye-catching. Based on my perspective, I recommend modifying the dashboards, especially the main dashboard where I can see the traffic hit count, alerts, and other latest information. In terms of reporting, I find it challenging to create reports; in my earlier days, it was difficult. Over time, I have learned how to create reports, but it should be easier to do so. I have used other tools such as firewalls or SolarWinds, where creating a report is straightforward and does not take much time, unlike in Imperva, where I have to add many elements. Modifications in the integration aspects would also be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare has made management of my website much easier by combining various functions in one platform without compromising quality."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"Cloudflare makes it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple users and multiple clients, and basically go in and access their account, make the changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"Using the CDN of Cloudflare improved the speed significantly, reducing the page loading times to appropriate levels."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"If someone is looking for a secure and optimized wrapper over an open website, I would suggest CloudFlare services."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"The solution operates smoothly at its baseline level, and we do not encounter any issues at that level."
"AWS Shield is aligned with the web application firewall (WAF), and they work seamlessly together, primarily working with Elastic Load Balancer, CloudFront, and Route 53 for CDN and DNS services protection."
"It is quite scalable, and we have not faced any issues with its scalability."
"AWS Shield offers numerous protection features that are crucial at the application layer, safeguarding users from distributed denial of service attacks, man-in-the-middle assaults, and hacker orchestrations."
"If most of your internet presence from your application side is in AWS, AWS Shield is a great option."
"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."
"The automatic detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks in the product operates in real-time and provides satisfactory results."
"We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, which is crucial for us. It's easy to use and set up and stops attacks on our servers. We haven't encountered any attack problems because the solution stops them in real-time. AWS Shield specifically focuses on defending against denial-of-service attacks, making it a great solution for that type of threat."
"This product is a reliable defense from malicious attacks on a network environment."
"The solution can scale."
"On the real time, you can see live traffic, which is flowing into our website."
"The solution is very scalable; it is one of the most important features, and you can also expand resources and features as well."
"Integration with IBM AS/400 and Db2 is okay."
"On the activity log, I can see the exact details, the visit, and the threat."
"There is no need to have an in-house WAF to manage and maintain; we are now able to bring a new website live within minutes, without false positive alerts, and it has improved user/customer experience and website performance."
"There are some features that are configured by default, so even without doing much, it can still provide a level of protection."
 

Cons

"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"Several features that I think is essential is not available in the free and business package."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"For the services I am using, it is a bit expensive."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"Eventually, things go sideways and require fixes when it would have been easier to prevent the issue initially."
"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."
"The management of it is a bit hard. If you don't engineer it on the front side, it is hard to go back in and change it. It could be improved in terms of architecture requirements and then ongoing support requirements as a secondary component to it. People tend to set up things like this, and they just expect it to work without the care and feeding that needs to go back into it either from an application team or a network environment team."
"The product is expensive."
"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."
"The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."
"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a situation is normal or abnormal."
"AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods."
"AWS Shield Standard requires improvement, particularly regarding its dashboard since it currently provides limited coverage against comprehensive DDoS attacks."
"Delivery services and information security."
"Support is one thing I wish Imperva could improve."
"The tool needs to improve CPU and storage memory."
"I would say that technical support is average."
"I am not sure if this application has a policy where you can create your custom policy and run it as our firewall. We should have some ability to also create some custom policy, then run it as a firewall."
"I would like the solution to improve its support response time."
"It should be more user-friendly. Like other web solutions, it would be helpful to be able to easily do policy configuration and identification inside the application. Understanding the in-depth configuration of a policy is somewhat difficult for an engineer, and they can improve that."
"The cost could be lower; our end clients need to have a high budget to purchase this solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"It depends on your subscription level and the volume that you're spending with AWS. So, it is very relative to the consumption alignment in your subscription level. It is a well-constructed, scalable pricing option, but it is relative to how much you're spending on AWS. Because the more you spend, typically, the more you get off on services like this. I find it to be comparable to other solutions."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."
"The tool is cheap."
"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."
"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."
"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."
"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
"It is a very expensive solution. The price is very high. A lot of customers tell us that they would love to use Imperva more. I have some customers who have 50 websites, but they have only 10 websites on Imperva because of the price. They would love to have all their websites running through Imperva, but they can't. They have to choose the more critical websites to protect because the price is very high. It is a very good product, but it is too expensive. If you buy a plan for 20 megabytes and you don't consume all of your 20 megabytes, it is okay, but if you consume more, you are charged for the superior traffic."
"It is a very affordable solution."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business88
Midsize Enterprise25
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Shield?
The pricing structure for AWS Shield is fair, yet it depends on the specific protections chosen. Enabling Shield Adva...
What needs improvement with AWS Shield?
Services always benefit from improvements, including AWS Shield. With respect to the Web Application Firewall, curren...
What is your primary use case for AWS Shield?
What do you use it for? How do you use it?
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 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 needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators o...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API 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.
netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. Imperva Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.