Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

Azure Front Door vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

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Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Thomas Zebar

Azure Principal Architect at Cloud Computech Consultancy

Provides great security with a good application firewall

The initial setup is straightforward. If you want to use the portal, CLI, or PowerShare, or you want to use automation data for one month, it's straightforward. Even when it comes to operational maintenance, it's pretty easy and straightforward. Microsoft has done a great job on that front. Maintenance generally requires someone who is a cloud administrator or similar to maintain services in general, with Front Door a small piece of a larger maintenance requirement. There's not a lot to manage, the configuration is simple. I encourage people to document the configuration and infrastructure as well as disaster recovery in case anything happens.

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Abdullah Jin

Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers bot protection and DDoS Protection and protects public-facing portals

Support is one thing I wish Imperva could improve. They follow the phone model and keep rotating you from one customer service person to another. The layer one support isn't very clear about the workings of the product. My feedback is primarily about Imperva Cloud, not on-premise. On-premise is a whole new story. Support is the issue for Imperva Cloud. It's also a bit pricey. It's a premium service and very expensive. The licensing model is not very straightforward. Every feature is priced separately, and to enjoy maximum protection, you'll have to spend a lot of money. The licensing model is a bit complex, and each feature is very pricey. For example, API security and web application protection are two separate license packages.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

More Cloudflare pros

"The web application firewall is a great feature."

"The most valuable feature is that you can implement resources globally. It does not depend on location and ability or something like that. This is to connect clients around the world."

"Rules Engine is a valuable feature."

"You can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."

"The most valuable feature is that I can have CDN and load-balancing capabilities in a single service instead of managing two separate tools."

"I particularly appreciate its load-balancing capabilities as it allows us to manage multiple instances and support a global presence effectively."

"The price is one of the most important aspects of the product. It's quite affordable."

"The tool is easy to use for beginners."

More Azure Front Door pros

"The features I have found most valuable with Imperva Web Application Firewall are account takeover protection, advanced bot protection, and API security."

"Imperva WAF's strongest features are the detection of web application threats and vulnerabilities in the source code."

"The WAF itself has been very valuable to me because it has such a complete range of features. Another reason why I like it is because it also takes care of the total overview of the traffic over the network."

"Protection is the best solution since it has profile functionality."

"The solution has been quite stable. I have not seen any bugs at all."

"We can prevent attacks or issues even before they happen."

"The solution is stable."

"Imperva monitors all traffic, even customer access, to the web application. Then, Imperva uses features like signatures to identify attacks like cross-site scripting or SQL injection."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

More Cloudflare cons

"This is a relatively expensive solution."

"The product needs to improve its latency."

"The user interface needs improvement as it is difficult to create the mapping to link the problem with your private address sources."

"My suggestion for improvement would be to enhance the Data Export feature to include specific tables, particularly the Azure Diagnostics table."

"In the tool, there needs to be a good amount of monitoring in the area of health probes to capture in front of what is happening."

"We should be able to use Front Door defenders with multiple cloud vendors. Currently, they can be used only with the Azure cloud. Azure Front Door should also be able to do global load balancing and provide internal front door services. Microsoft should clearly define what Traffic Manager, Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door products do. These are similar products, and people get confused between these products."

"There is room for improvement and they're working on it."

"The product's features are limited compared to Cloudflare. The tool also doesn't work well in a hybrid environment. I would like to see a way to add personalized APIs in the system."

More Azure Front Door cons

"Sometimes our web application firewall will slow down."

"The process to upgrade from one version to another can be a lot simpler than it is currently."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by adding more features to the dashboard. increasing the visibility of the real-time events, besides configuring the administration itself."

"The product's customization capabilities are a bit problematic, requiring support cases for backend modifications."

"They can provide an option to create reports, automatically import the entire report, and create rules again. In a real-life crisis, it would be helpful to be able to import a report and generate security rules from that report. I should be able to create a simple query and import the reports automatically. It can maybe also tell us the format of the report."

"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."

"They recently separated the WAF and the DAM management gateways in order for each of these to be managed from different areas, so I believe it now requires additional investments for what was previously a single complete solution."

"Their portal is very limited and needs improvement."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"We are using the free version."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."

"Considering the standard licensing of the tool, even though we have not checked the billing as of now, it might not be very costly."

"The pricing of the solution is good."

"The product is expensive."

"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"There are a couple of different licensing models."

"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."

"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."

"It is a very affordable solution."

"It is very costly, but the return on investment is very high. Its cost was around $70,000, and we got it back in just six months."

"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."

"The tool is expensive."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?

We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...

What do you like most about Azure Front Door?

Rules Engine is a valuable feature.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Front Door?

It's a matter of value versus price. If we add more features and raise the price, it must remain justifiable. If we m...

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

My recommendation is Imperva.

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...

DDoS solutions: Any other solutions to consider aside from Radware DefensePro and F5 Silverline DDoS Protection?

You can have a look to Imperva Cloud WAF, the anti-DDoS mitigation is under 1s and works very well. I observed a lot ...

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 48% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Compared 3% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Amazon CloudFront vs Azure Front Door

Compared 17% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Azure Front Door

Compared 12% of the time

Akamai vs Azure Front Door

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Azure Front Door

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Firewall vs Azure Front Door

Compared 4% of the time

More Azure Front Door Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 17% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 16% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 14% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

NetScaler vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 2% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Azure Front Door

Download Azure Front Door product report

Imperva Web Application Firewall

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Azure Front-Door

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Cloudflare

Microsoft

Imperva

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Azure Front Door is employed for securing external traffic, global load balancing, integrating web application firewalls, enabling disaster recovery, and enhancing application accessibility.

Organizations leverage Azure Front Door to support data publishing, act as a CDN, and ensure low latency for global users. Clients use it to protect numerous internet-accessible applications, integrate with DNS, and implement custom routes. Favored for caching web content and securely, efficiently distributing traffic to backend services, Azure Front Door offers SSL offloading, traffic inspection, and global scalability. Users value its affordability, ease of implementation, and web application firewall. Azure Front Door provides rich security features, traffic management, and URL rewriting. Load-balancing capabilities enhance performance with additional content security policies and bot protection. Integrations, including with GitOps, along with combined CDN and load-balancing, are also highlighted.

What are the most important features?

SSL Offloading: Reduces the burden on backend services
Traffic Inspection: Enhances security by inspecting incoming traffic
Global Scalability: Ensures performance for users worldwide
Web Application Firewall: Provides in-depth security features
Load Balancing: Distributes traffic to improve performance
URL Rewriting: Customizes URL paths for better navigation
Bot Protection: Shields applications from automated threats
Integrations: Supports technologies like GitOps
Combined CDN and Load-Balancing: Streamlines content delivery and traffic management

What are the benefits or ROI of using this service?

Affordability: Provides cost-effective solutions for web traffic management
Ease of Implementation: Streamlines setup processes for quick deployment
Enhanced Security: Offers robust protection for web applications
Improved Performance: Optimizes traffic distribution and latency
Scalability: Supports growing application demands with global reach

Azure Front Door finds usage across multiple industries due to its versatile applications. E-commerce companies benefit from improved global accessibility and speed, while financial institutions leverage its security features for protecting sensitive data. Media and entertainment sectors use its CDN capabilities for seamless content delivery, and healthcare providers rely on its compliance and protection standards for patient data security.

Imperva Web Application Firewall is a versatile solution that protects web applications and databases from various attacks, including DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks. It offers data security, availability, and access control and can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud.

The solution has good security against web attacks and offers advanced bot protection, API security, and mitigation features. Imperva WAF is easy to configure and deploy; it has good customer service and an excellent user interface.

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Information Not Available

BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens

Azure Front Door vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall