Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

Check Point Software Technologies and Imperva are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Check Point Software Technologies is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.7, while Imperva is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.9. Additionally, 100% of Check Point Software Technologies 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 Check Point CloudGuard WAF compete in the web application firewall market. Check Point CloudGuard holds an edge in AI-driven features and seamless cloud integration, which are increasingly crucial for modern applications.

Features: Imperva Web Application Firewall offers correlated attack validation, virtual patching, and account takeover protection. Check Point CloudGuard WAF features advanced AI capabilities, ease of API integration, and comprehensive threat prevention.

Room for Improvement: Imperva users suggest enhancements to the user interface, real-time traffic visibility, and support response times. Check Point CloudGuard users recommend improvements in administrative portal latency, documentation, and real-time monitoring.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Imperva WAF is known for rapid deployment across on-premises and cloud environments with generally well-regarded support. Check Point CloudGuard is flexible in public and hybrid cloud deployment, although support availability concerns exist.

Pricing and ROI: Imperva's pricing is considered high due to complex licensing and extra costs for features, yet it offers strong ROI in DDoS protection. Check Point CloudGuard offers competitive pricing with bundled packages, though slightly more costly than some competitors like Azure WAF.

To learn more, read our detailed Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Check Point CloudGuard WAF 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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Ashish Upadhyay

Founder at BlockMosiac

Automation capabilities also help streamline security processes and smooths down API integration processes and detects API availability

There is room for improvement in the pricing strategy. By reducing their cost and extending the trial period, Check Point can attract more partnerships and customers, keeping up with other vendors in the field. It has a trial period, but they can extend it so we can better evaluate how it's working in our environment and how well it is suited. It should be converted to activate some discounts on buying standard versions. This will attract more of us, and we'll get more time to check the application and how it works. Additionally, their effort to involve IT teams would mean continuous adaptation to meet business requirements. This can help with the price picture and increasing the trial period so we can better evaluate the cost-effectiveness. Also, Check Point need to continue developing new features and arrangements in line with changing business requirements. The analysis time while it analyzes itself is very time-consuming. They need to improve the latency and minimize the steps involved. Also, the documentation needs to be updated, more improved, and simplified... so that even a beginner can start with this application. It can make things more beginner-friendly. Also, Check Point can bring some updates to the integration features with other security solutions, making it easier to integrate. For instance, it needs to integrate with solutions someone might have various firewall solutions from IBM and others, depending on which ones the business wants to integrate with.

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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 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."

"It's very user-friendly."

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

"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."

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

"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."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

More Cloudflare pros

"I find the configuration and real-time monitoring features valuable."

"Its main value and what we liked the most is its powerful AI."

"The solution offers sophisticated security techniques with unique characteristics that can be particularly valuable for the financial sector, which is where we develop apps."

"It helps us streamline our revenue streams, and we're spending less money on application security."

"On the endpoint side, the most valuable feature is undoubtedly the cloud-based management capability, along with the ransomware protection, despite not encountering any instances so far."

"The solution's strongest point is that you can connect everything to it, giving you a full view of what's connected."

"Machine learning is a valuable tool for this assessment because it allows for a two-phase approach: secure and non-secure."

"It provides advanced analytics that gives each team time to prepare for any threat that might occur in the future."

More Check Point CloudGuard WAF pros

"The valuable features of Imperva WAF include its effective security breach prevention through automatically updating rules."

"It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications."

"It works right out of the box once you integrate the application."

"The most important feature I have found to be the ease in how to do the backup and restores."

"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."

"The most valuable features of the Imperva Web Application Firewall are DDoS, malware, and the other malicious threat prevention it provides. Additionally, third-party integration is available. You can forward the log for further analysis."

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

"Very scalable and very stable firewall for web applications, with a good interface in its cloud version. Mitigation is its most valuable feature. The technical support for this product is also good."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

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

"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."

"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 product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"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."

"DNS Management."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

More Cloudflare cons

"I feel like I need more clarity in understanding pricing for DDoS protection."

"The learning curve was a challenge due to initially incorrect configurations."

"We would like the solution to be more economical since it is not accessible to all clients."

"I advise proactive threat detection intelligence offline, which can also help monitor and ensure system checks and compliances are in place."

"CloudGuard could improve in areas such as ease of integration with Fortinet and reducing costs associated with deployment in cloud environments like Azure."

"We would like to have a solution of this type for the administration of applications from mobile devices."

"It doesn't detect user activity like some of its competitors. It's not a vulnerability, but it's a legitimate activity that it doesn't detect. It only detects vulnerabilities or misconfigurations."

"It was costlier than other solutions."

More Check Point CloudGuard WAF cons

"The UI interface needs improvement."

"There is nothing specific where the application firewall is falling short."

"The signature updates could be faster. Sometimes we have to upload signatures to the Imperva portal for checking and analysis before we can use them."

"There could be some limitations that from the converged infrastructure perspective: when you want to converge with everything and you want Imperva to get there easily because it's not a cloud component. For example, when you want to build servers and you're using OneView to manage your software-defined networks, implementing Imperva right away is not that simple. But if you're doing just a simple cloud infrastructure with servers in there, you're good to go. Also, we are not able, with Imperva, to block by signatures. Imperva by itself needs to be complemented with another service to do URL filtering."

"Support is one thing I wish Imperva could improve."

"I am looking for more data enrichment. We should have the ability to add our own custom data to the system, to the live traffic."

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

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

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable."

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

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"I work for an Indian banking client. In India, companies are on a budget. The company liked Check Point very much, but it was a little bit costly compared to FortiWeb. However, it had more features compared to FortiWeb."

"If the pricing for the Infinity platform covers everything, it would be more straightforward. I had a hard time selling it to our CEO as a former CFO because of the differentials. There are different deltas year to year over a five-year period. It is very difficult to explain. It would be easier to digest for our executives if there was a flatter scale"

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly and competitive."

"The pricing is competitive compared to other solutions on the market. So, the licensing cost is average."

"Considering all the benefits we've observed, we find the price to be satisfactory."

"I find the pricing to be reasonable."

"The base solution costs approximately 30,000 euros, with an additional 2,000 euros per year for licenses and support."

"It is not cheap, but it is worth it."

More Check Point CloudGuard WAF pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

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

"There are a couple of different licensing models."

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

"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."

"There are some licenses that you have to buy to use some features. Its price could be better. Price is always important because, at the end of the day, customers have a budget. If you can meet the budget, you can sell, and if you don't, you cannot sell."

"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."

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

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Security Firm

Manufacturing 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...

See all answers

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 do you like most about CloudGuard for Application Security?

We have not had any incidents. We could realize its benefits immediately. We watched and monitored the traffic, and i...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudGuard for Application Security?

The base solution costs approximately 30,000 euros, with an additional 2,000 euros per year for licenses and support....

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What needs improvement with CloudGuard for Application Security?

The learning curve was a challenge due to initially incorrect configurations. It took approximately a month and a hal...

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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 Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% 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

More Cloudflare Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Check Point CloudGuard WAF

Compared 17% of the time

AWS WAF vs Check Point CloudGuard WAF

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Check Point CloudGuard WAF

Compared 11% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Check Point CloudGuard WAF

Compared 9% of the time

open-appsec vs Check Point CloudGuard WAF

Compared 9% of the time

More Check Point CloudGuard WAF Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 18% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 14% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 1% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Check Point CloudGuard WAF

February 2025

Download Check Point CloudGuard WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

January 2025

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Check Point CloudGuard Application Security, CloudGuard Application Security, CloudGuard AppSec

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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

Check Point CloudGuard WAF (Web Application Firewall) is a cloud-native security solution designed to protect web applications and APIs from known and unknown threats. It employs contextual AI and machine learning to prevent zero-day attacks without relying on traditional signature-based detection methods, ensuring that applications remain secure even as new threats emerge.

CloudGuard WAF offers preemptive protection against vulnerabilities by using machine learning to identify and block zero-day threats like Log4Shell and Spring4Shell. It provides precise detection capabilities, minimizing the need for constant fine-tuning and reducing false positives. Designed for cloud-native environments, CloudGuard WAF integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, supporting automated deployment and configuration through infrastructure as code (IaC) or APIs.

Key Features of CloudGuard WAF:

ML-Based Threat Prevention: Stops application-layer attacks, including those listed in the OWASP Top 10, with minimal tuning and no reliance on signature updates.
API Discovery and Security: Identifies and secures APIs, preventing misuse and enforcing API schemas to protect against unauthorized access.
Bot and DDoS Prevention: Detects and mitigates automated attacks that can disrupt services or degrade customer experiences.
Intrusion Prevention (IPS): Provides protection against over 2,800 web-related CVEs using Check Point’s award-winning IPS technology.

Benefits of CloudGuard WAF:

Zero-Day Protection: Mitigates risks from newly discovered vulnerabilities without waiting for signature updates.
Reduced Operational Overhead: Eliminates the need for constant manual tuning and exception handling, simplifying security management.
Comprehensive API Security: Enhances control over your attack surface by discovering and securing all APIs, including shadow, rogue, and deprecated endpoints.
Fast and Easy Deployment: Deployable within minutes via WAF as a Service (WAFaaS), requiring only a one-time DNS configuration for immediate protection.

CloudGuard WAF is particularly suitable for organizations using modern, cloud-based architectures that require robust, automated security measures for both applications and APIs. Its capabilities are valuable for industries that handle sensitive data, such as finance or healthcare, where compliance and data protection are critical. Pricing and support are typically customized to the specific needs and scale of the deployment, with options for continuous updates and maintenance through Check Point's managed services.

CloudGuard WAF by Check Point provides advanced, AI-driven protection for web applications and APIs, offering automated, precise threat prevention and easy integration with cloud-native environments, ensuring robust security without the need for extensive manual configuration.

Check Point Software Technologies

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.

Orange España, Paschoalotto

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

Buyer's Guide

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

January 2025

Free Report: Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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