F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

Download the complete report

Helped 842,296 peers since 2012

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.

Read full review

Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable

Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

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

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

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

More Cloudflare pros

"F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements."

"It provides web application security and reduces bot attacks."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily."

"Provides good protection from attacks."

"F5 Advanced WAF helps our engineers to learn the complete configuration, including fundamental and advanced policies."

"F5 Advanced WAF has very good stability and scalability. Its initial setup was straightforward."

"The solution's most valuable features include application DDoS protection, bot blocking, and HTTP header verifications."

"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"The solution integrates seamlessly with other tools and has a good alert mechanism."

"Imperva is a Gartner leader, so its scalability, performance, and features are excellent."

"Configuration for different application sources is most valuable. We can segregate the traffic that an application is carrying and identify the sizing in Imperva."

"It has fewer false positives"

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

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is stable."

"The dynamic profiling of websites is the solution's most valuable feature. The security is also good."

"Learning mode and custom policies are helpful features."

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."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"DNS Management."

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

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"This solution can be made more user-friendly."

"I think the deployment templates can be better."

"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."

"Its price should be better. It is expensive."

"The reporting could be clearer and embedded to include our movement data."

"I would like to see improved features in the F5 Advanced WAF solution, especially with a focus on enabling Kubernetes fully."

"The solution could improve by having an independent capture module. It has a built feature that you can deploy the capture on your published website. However, it's not very user-friendly. When you compare this feature to Google Capture or other enterprise captures, they are very simple. It needs a good connection to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. When you implement this feature in the data center, you may suffer some complications with connecting to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. This should be improved in the future."

"The solution should include RASP for another level of protection at the code itself."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"One potential improvement for Imperva is enhancing its alert system."

"I loved the approach of the cloud. The cloud has a lot of new features, like advanced web protection and DDoS protection. If those could also be on-boarded onto the on-prem versions, that would be ideal. They need to pay attention to both deployment options and not just favor one."

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

"Their portal is very limited and needs improvement."

"Sometimes our web application firewall will slow down."

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

"The UI interface needs improvement."

"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

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

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required."

"After buying the program, you just pay for the support every year."

"Its price is fair. We have done a couple of deals where they were able to give some kind of discount to the customers. The price was initially high for the customers, but after a couple of negotiations, it came within their budget. They were happy with that."

"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."

"There is an annual subscription for this solution."

"The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is comparable to a Rolls-Royce. Its price is a bit high when you compare it with other vendors. F5 Advanced WAF is a bit expensive. The customer was on a three-year plan and it was around $560,000."

"It's more expensive than other solutions and depending on the modules, there can be additional fees."

"The price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve it is expensive."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

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

"The solution's pricing is an issue."

"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."

"The tool is expensive."

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

"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."

"It is a very affordable solution."

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

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.

See recommendations

842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing 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 do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?

It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the r...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost, leading to amb...

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

F5 Advanced WAF sells perpetual licenses as perpetual assets during sales without informing me that support ends afte...

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 DDoS Protection Service 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 ...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 22% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Front Door vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 4% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 4% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 17% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Radware Alteon vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

F5 Advanced WAF

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Imperva Web Application Firewall

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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

F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.

F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.

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.

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

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

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall