Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

Microsoft and Imperva are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Microsoft is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.7, while Imperva is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.9. Additionally, 100% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Imperva Web Application Firewall and Azure Front Door compete in the web security and content delivery network category. Imperva seems to have the upper hand with its comprehensive security features despite challenges in UI, while Azure Front Door is favored for global application deployment and user-friendly configuration but faces some limitations in load balancing.

Features: Imperva Web Application Firewall offers threat radar for detecting potential attacks, seamless integration with existing systems, and robust DDoS protection. On the other hand, Azure Front Door provides extensive CDN capabilities, effective bot protection to prevent automated cyber threats, and efficient load balancing, making it particularly appealing for managing traffic across multiple regions.

Room for Improvement: Users of Imperva indicate that policy management could be streamlined, the complex UI can be confusing, and there are concerns about false positives. Azure Front Door users suggest enhancing global load balancing capabilities and providing better clarification of product functionalities, as some features may not be intuitive for all users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Imperva offers versatility with both on-premises and cloud deployments but some users find the complexity challenging. Its technical support receives praise, though delays occur at times. Azure Front Door is primarily cloud-based, making its deployment relatively straightforward, though it might require additional localized support due to certain technical issues.

Pricing and ROI: Imperva is perceived as expensive but offers substantial ROI, particularly in sectors like banking. Its hybrid environment support allows for variable pricing based on selected protection levels. Azure Front Door provides a pay-as-you-go model with flexible tiers, which can become costly if premium features are selected, but users value the competitive balance of features and pricing.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Front Door vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Front Door vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

January 2025

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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

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

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

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

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

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

"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."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

More Cloudflare pros

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

"Has a great application firewall and we like the security."

"Rules Engine is a valuable 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."

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

"The solution is good."

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

"It inspects the traffic at the network level before it comes into Azure. We can do SSL offloading, and it can detect abnormalities before the traffic comes into the application. It can be used globally and is easy to set up. It is also quite stable and scalable."

More Azure Front Door pros

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a highly stable solution and is very mature."

"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."

"One good thing about Imperva Web Application Firewall is it can be on the cloud and also it can be on-premise."

"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."

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

"It is easy to use and has good security."

"Compared to other web application firewalls in the market, Imperva does things in the most accurate way."

"There are many features. There is ease of deployment. You can deploy the Imperva Web Application Firewall in two to three minutes. After that, you have to set the policies. For setting policies, you have toggle buttons. You can turn something on or off."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."

"DNS Management."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."

"Latencies are always a problem."

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

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

"The product needs to improve its latency."

"It lacks sufficient functionality."

"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."

"This is a relatively expensive solution."

"There's a limitation on the amount of global rules we can add."

More Azure Front Door cons

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

"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."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by providing better features, such as improved prevention of zero-day attacks. Additionally, it should include a VR meta-analysis."

"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 Imperva Web Application Firewall automations are good, but there is still room for improvement with them."

"I would like to improve the tool's turnaround time in terms of support."

"I think that better bot protection is needed in this solution."

"It would be nice to have more security control over mobile applications so I would suggest adding more mobile security features. It would also be beneficial to see improvements in regards to interface bandwidth performance, CPU time, and RAM size. Learning capability of the device is quite weak."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."

"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."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

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

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The solution is a bit expensive."

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

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

"The pricing of the solution is good."

"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 product is expensive."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall's pricing is expensive."

"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."

"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."

"The price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."

"The solution's pricing is an issue."

"There are a couple of different licensing models."

"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."

"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

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...

See all answers

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...

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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.

See all answers

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...

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What do you like most about Azure Front Door?

Rules Engine is a valuable feature.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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

My recommendation is Imperva.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Amazon CloudFront vs Azure Front Door

Compared 17% of the time

Akamai vs Azure Front Door

Compared 12% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Azure Front Door

Compared 11% of the time

Azure Firewall vs Azure Front Door

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway 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 13% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 2% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Azure Front Door

February 2025

Download Azure Front Door product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

February 2025

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Azure Front-Door

No data available

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

Cloudflare

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.

Microsoft

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.

Imperva

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

Buyer's Guide

Azure Front Door vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

January 2025

Free Report: Azure Front Door vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Front Door vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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