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Imperva DDoS vs NetScaler 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
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Imperva DDoS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (7th)
NetScaler
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (1st), Network Management Applications (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (11th)
 

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.
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.
DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking
Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"An improvement has been to our website: It increases the speed of our response, the capacity of the site, and optimizes the bandwidth.​"
"It is a stable solution."
"On the site security, I can see which countries have incidents, whether it was a robot attack, a real human user, or non-human user."
"​Technical support provides good, quick responses."
"Scalability is pretty easy on the base platform. You just add another, and you're ready to go."
"The solution is very good at intercepting traffic before it gets to our data centers."
"Integration with IBM AS/400 and Db2 is okay."
"Imperva DDoS is fairly stable, and its availability is quite high."
"I find all of it to be valuable, because of the flexibility that is built into this product."
"We like the periodic upgrades and backups, also made via ADMs, and it makes our environment much more robust and reliable."
"Citrix Web App API Protection allows you to enable a blocking mode"
"The maintenance of the solution is not complex."
"The web application firewall is one feature I found valuable in the solution."
"We have good customer support."
"Content Switching provides flexibility for routing traffic as desired to designated real servers. It also provides good geo capabilities through its GSLB feature."
"What I like most about Citrix NetScaler is its stability, and I didn't see a lot of issues with it."
 

Cons

"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."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"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."
"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."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive."
"Imperva DDoS does not provide version control."
"We had an issue when securing the web applications for DDoS protection."
"The solution needs to improve Integration with third parties for their on-prem deployment models. The integration is not that good yet."
"Certificate management could be improved."
"Its price could be improved. It is quite expensive. It will be good if we could export the configuration. Currently, to control the configuration, we need to go to each website, which is not very convenient."
"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."
"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."
"Some of our customers have questioned the security of this solution lately, wondering whether it is safe or not, so enhancements in this respect would be good."
"The solution is a bit more expensive than some of the available solutions in this region. One solution in particular that I noticed was cheaper was Kemp."
"Technical support could be improved."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"The product could be improved by making it easier to use and easier to implement."
"An area for improvement in Citrix Web App and API Protection is for it to give real-time notifications and alerts. It would be practical if the solution warns you if there's an attack or if the load or traffic volume increases or decreases. An additional feature I'd like to see in Citrix Web App and API Protection is a prediction or artificial intelligence on what is happening, for example, attacks."
"We had some bugs in the previous firmware. These were not big issues, but more testing on the firmware would be key to happier customers."
"ADC from Citrix has added functionalities from other products and the usability is very difficult for someone who is used to a simpler user interface, it's a little bit of a mess to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"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 product's pricing is cheap."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"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."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"It is a very expensive solution. The price is very high. A lot of customers tell us that they would love to use Imperva more. I have some customers who have 50 websites, but they have only 10 websites on Imperva because of the price. They would love to have all their websites running through Imperva, but they can't. They have to choose the more critical websites to protect because the price is very high. It is a very good product, but it is too expensive. If you buy a plan for 20 megabytes and you don't consume all of your 20 megabytes, it is okay, but if you consume more, you are charged for the superior traffic."
"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"I do not have any experience with the pricing of the product."
"After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more expensive."
"The solution's pricing is very high compared to its competitors."
"For partners, NetScaler is not as expensive price-wise versus F5."
"For the specific use case that my customers primarily engage with, I would give the pricing a rating of seven out of ten."
"The tool is cheap."
"Costly product and complicated licensing."
"Regarding pricing, while it's expensive, I can't comment on the exact ROI without a budget analysis. However, in terms of service quality, it's worth the price."
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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
23%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
8%
 

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 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...
What do you like most about Citrix ADC?
The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic ente...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADC?
After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more...
What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?
Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexi...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Incapsula
Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall
 

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.
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva DDoS vs. NetScaler and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
841,605 professionals have used our research since 2012.