F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Imperva Bot Management vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

The compared F5 and Imperva solutions aren't in the same category. F5 is ranked #2 in ADC , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 15.6% mindshare in the category. Imperva is ranked #7 in BM , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 6.3% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...

Read 121 F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) reviews

6,644 Views
5,506 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Imperva Bot Management

Read 2 Imperva Bot Management reviews

243 Views
199 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...

Read 3 The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) reviews

688 Views
498 Comparison Views

50% willing to recommend

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...

Imperva Bot Management

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Imperva Bot Management, and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetScaler, F5, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 849,600 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:

Mindshare comparison

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Bot Management

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Bonieber Orofeo

Information Security Manager at Chong Hua Hospital

Identifying compromised traffic and securing data has been a significant advantage

One of the most beneficial features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) ( /products/f5-big-ip-local-traffic-manager-ltm-reviews ) is its ability to identify compromised traffic and its capabilities in authentication. Additionally, the security aspect of it provides a significant advantage as it helps us secure our data, which is a major investment and benefit for us. Before using this system, we had difficulties in storing our data and managing the traffic that comes in and out.

Read full review

RiaanDu Preez

Senior Cyber Security Specialist Architect at Cyberlinx

A product that offers advanced bot detection capabilities and reporting features

The scalability of the product is high. I rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten. It is very easy to use the scalability features of the product, especially if the product is deployed on the cloud model, but it may be a different story if the tool is deployed on an on-premises model. The difficulty of using the scalability feature nude of the product arises when the client does not have the capacity to scale up. My company deals with businesses of all sizes. One of my company's clients who uses the solution has five members and a large e-commerce environment. There are also enterprise-sized clients who use the solution.

Read full review

Archana Heeralal

Security Engineer at Amazon

A good solution to implement web application firewall for applications

There are some lags in Signal Sciences for the web application firewalls. Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic. There is a little bit of complexity with custom rules that should be removed. Signal Sciences should add a feature called rate limiting with multiple options, wherein I can create a rate limiting based on the cookie request or the IP.

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

"Initial setup was straightforward. We were up and running in three hours."

"iRule feature is useful."

"The most valuable feature I found is iRules."

"The load balancing function, the monitors that you can create, and iRules programmability are most valuable."

"Routing and load balancing are its most valuable features."

"The F5 interface is easy to use."

"The most valuable features are DNS, APM, and ASM. Additionally, it is easy to use and you have a lot of flexibility to use the solution within a network."

"Where we are finding the AWS version helpful is when we are trying to scale up new environments. AWS Marketplace helps here a lot."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pros

"I am impressed with the product's automatic bot mechanism. It also gives us the control to create our own custom bot rules."

"The stability of the product is good since I haven't had any problems with the solution."

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."

"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."

"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."

Cons

"In terms of native integrations, there is a lot of instability. Also, integration is not robust with F5."

"Its GUI could be a bit better. Other than that, it's already pretty good. We don't use it in a high-performance environment. So, we don't really care so much about too many features."

"The management interface is unclear, complex, and not concise. I would like a better user interface."

"They need to improve the interface and some of the functionalities."

"For a future release, I would like to see more features in the cloud."

"I think the logging could be improved."

"Not everything is intuitive."

"I would like F5 to incorporate the ability to create your own custom roles and customised permissions within the product set. I have seen many customers wanting to give a certain level of access for the purposes of out-of-hours servicing to out-of-hours staff or teams that fulfill an operations type role."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) cons

"Sometimes, it takes a bit of time for the technical staff of the solution to get back to our company with a resolution for our problems."

"The tool needs to include artificial intelligence and machine learning. It also needs to improve profiling."

"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."

"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."

"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model of F5 BIG-IP LTM is highly complex. The operation cost of the solution is high. The overall cost is high."

"I would recommend that the cost be lowered."

"It is quite expensive as a product. Because it is very stable, it is also expensive."

"F5 is expensive."

"It's not a cheap product, but there are no other replacements for what we do with it."

"The price of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is too high."

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good. We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because everything that we needed was a soft appliance. We needed something to work in Amazon, and this product was available there."

"The cost that they have with AWS are almost prohibitive. I'm being forced to use F5 WAF. I would not simply use it based on cost. I agree that they have some great features, but for me, cost is key in terms of AWS."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pricing and cost advice

"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"The tool's pricing is good."

"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."

"The product has an affordable cost."

"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

849,600 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

33%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Media Company

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

18%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP?

The price needs improvement as it is quite costly.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for F5 BIG-IP?

We're using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) ( /products/f5-big-ip-local-traffic-manager-ltm-reviews ) for our a...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?

The solution is robust and reliable.

See all answers

What do you like most about Imperva Bot Management?

The stability of the product is good since I haven't had any problems with the solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Imperva Bot Management?

I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price. The pric...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Imperva Bot Management?

At the moment, I am okay with the product. I haven't found something that needs to be improved yet. I am not physical...

See all answers

What do you like most about Signal Sciences?

The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?

The pricing is 50% less than Akamai.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?

Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiADC vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 20% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

HAProxy vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

NetScaler vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Competitors

DataDome vs Imperva Bot Management

Compared 43% of the time

Cloudflare vs Imperva Bot Management

Compared 33% of the time

F5 Shape Security vs Imperva Bot Management

Compared 24% of the time

More Imperva Bot Management Competitors

Cloudflare vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 26% of the time

AWS WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 18% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Front Door vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 12% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 9% of the time

More The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

April 2025

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report

Download F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) product report

Buyer's Guide

Bot Management

March 2025

Download Imperva Bot Management product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) report

Download The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) product report

Also Known As

F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP

Distil Networks, Distil Bot Detection and Mitigation

Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP

Overview

F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.

BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

Distil Networks is the first easy and accurate way to identify and police malicious website traffic, blocking 99.9% of bad bots without impacting legitimate users. Only 41% of web traffic originates from humans, so it’s imperative to be able to detect and block automated attacks. Bots are the key culprits behind web scraping, online fraud, web application security breaches, content spam, digital ad fraud, and downtime. Distil Networks is purpose built to defeat bad bots that circumvent traditional web application defenses like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). Distil makes your web applications more secure with API security, real-time threat intelligence, a 24/7 security operations center, and complete visibility and control over human, good bot, and bad bot traffic.

Imperva

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) provides web application and API protection, RASP, rate limiting, bot protection and DDoS purpose built to eliminate the challenges of legacy WAF.

Fastly

Sample Customers

Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.

StubHub, Yelp, Glassdoor, DowJones, The Wall Street Journal, Whitepages, CrunchBase, AOL, Staples, Wayfair, EasyJet, Autotrader, Skyscanner, Orbitz, and Conde Nast, Amadeus, and Thomson Reuters, just to name a few.

Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about NetScaler, F5, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC). Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

849,600 professionals have used our research since 2012.