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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Imperva DDoS comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
Barracuda Web Application F...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (17th)
Imperva DDoS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (22nd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Anne-Aimee Wollerich - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing bot traffic effectively enhances usability for non-technical users
Barracuda Web Application Firewall ( /products/barracuda-web-application-firewall-reviews ) lacks some of the more specified and structured features offered by solutions like Tenable. Although Tenable is more expensive and less easily deployable, its features are more deepened and chiseled, particularly for IT personnel. For example, Tenable provides more comprehensive dark web scanning capabilities, which Barracuda could improve upon.
Syed Ubaid Ali Jafri - PeerSpot reviewer
I like the content monitoring feature which I haven't seen in other WAF solutions.
They could improve by minimizing false positive results. Although this occurs less with Imperva, we would like to see some further improvements. We have been using this product for last 1 years, it's result is very impressive. But due to the excessive load on the Web site where thousands of requests‎ are generated from legitimate users, however the request in which any sequential or specialised characters are requested would be directly blocked by impreva . Currently imperva blocks the special character request generated from the user, as I conduct a test where I am parsing the encoded html values of the same special characters to the input field, imperva bypasses these encoded values for example : ' i.e. %27 or / i.e %2F, the WAF bypasses these encoded characters. I hope that this device should have a capability to detect the pattern which is associated with Xss or Xsrf, rather then by not blocking the request which contains any special characters.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"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."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"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."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Web Application Firewall include advanced bot protection, DDoS protection, and addressing the top ten vulnerabilities."
"The solution ensures layer seven is secure from attacks."
"We use Barracuda to protect the application. That's the main feature we use it for."
"The stability of the solution is good. I don't think we've experienced bugs, crashes, or glitches."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to set up."
"Its recommendation about the probabilities on the website is great. It also has free probability managers for the website, which is really helpful. The protection engine, signature-based protection behavior, and analysis features are also great. It also has an ATP module for sandbox scanning and behavior analysis for file uploads."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the signature base."
"Some of the most valuable features are the ease of deployment, the Barracuda support, the easy-to-use console, and the granularity of the reports."
"It fits our requirements, as well as our budget."
"The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition."
"Setup was straightforward, very simple. I only entered the domain and Incapsula returned the DNS data that I needed to change for the protection to be configured."
"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."
"The most valuable features are DDoS protection."
"An improvement has been to our website: It increases the speed of our response, the capacity of the site, and optimizes the bandwidth.​"
"​Technical support provides good, quick responses."
"Incapsula takes care of the CDN infrastructure and bandwidth volume, providing several enterprise "load balancing" features."
 

Cons

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"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."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"We encountered a few glitches while implementing API security features into the product."
"The reporting aspect of the solution needs improvement. I don't find that it's very good. They could do some work on it to make it much better. It's not that the reporting isn't secure. It's just that I would prefer to store my reports for an extended period of time. Right now, that's not possible and I'd prefer it if that could change. I also would say that the reports themselves are expensive."
"Barracuda Web Application Firewall lacks some of the more specified and structured features offered by solutions like Tenable."
"In the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, there should be more affordable options for WAF as a service."
"Its interface can be better. It is not very friendly."
"The platform's pricing needs improvement."
"I have to go to an individual obligation, make changes, and come out, and go to the next obligation and make the same changes. There is no grouping option."
"The GUI needs to be improved because it sometimes hangs and needs to be restarted."
"It's quite expensive."
"The weakest point of Imperva is their first level of support, which should be improved. They should also improve the access and security logs viewing directly on the portal. I would like to see better access and security logs through the portal and not only through a SIM solution. Currently, if you want to explore your access and security logs from Imperva, you need a SIM tool or a SIM infrastructure on your side to do it. You can't do it manually or directly through the portal, which is a big problem for us. I had a call yesterday with Imperva for the roadmap, and I just told them this. They agreed that this is an improvement point from their side."
"It would be beneficial to include vulnerability management in the solution, similar to what they have for their on-premise solution."
"It would be better if we were able to manage and apply changes to multiple websites/web applications, and search WAF logs for multiple websites, via the Incapsula dashboard."
"We had an issue when securing the web applications for DDoS protection."
"Incapsula services also provides load balancing services for their service IP address environment. So far, with monitoring their services, the IP address was only changed once."
"The log analytics interface within Incapsula isn't really good. For example, if you have to get all logs from there, it's a very cumbersome process."
"The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"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."
"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."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"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."
"The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is quite expensive."
"While I would have to check on the price of the solution, I feel it to be okay and it matches the market price."
"The pricing is less compared to other web applications."
"The price is reasonable, more so than other products."
"The price of this solution is okay."
"Our licensing fees are paid annually and the cost is between €600 and €800 (approximately $665.00 to $885.00 USD)."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."
"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."
"It is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category."
"The solution's price is high for small companies."
"It is expensive."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

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 do you like most about Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
Our primary use case was to track the traffic on websites or webshops to identify potential malicious actors, such as...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
The pricing for Barracuda is quite high compared to other OEMs. Each transaction requires my purchase team to negotia...
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 is rated a ten on a scale where ten is very expensive. The solution is only cloud-based and does not prov...
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive. Additionally, support response times for emails can sometimes be d...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Imperva Incapsula
 

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.
Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Imperva DDoS and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.