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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Imperva DDoS comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 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
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in CDN
11th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.4
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (20th), API Security (7th), AWS Marketplace (28th)
Imperva DDoS
Ranking in CDN
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.7%, up from 21.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 0.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 6.5%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN
 

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.
FM
Protects web applications with comprehensive security features
All features are valuable. In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation. This is a comprehensive package for web application security. The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation.
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 UI is good."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
"The technical support is excellent."
"The setup of Imperva DDoS was easy."
"DDoS protection and WAF are the most valuable features. It is easy to deploy a service. It is easy and quick to deploy to a new website."
"Real-time monitoring is also a great tool, as you may watch several parameters in real time."
"It is an effective threat mitigation tool."
"IncapRules is one of the most valuable features, as you can create your own security and access control rules on top of your security policy. Using IncapRules we were able to easily block Layer 7 DDoS attacks several times."
"We use Imperva DDoS to stop DDoS attacks and reduce the amount of unwanted queries against web services or web scraping."
"This product is a reliable defense from malicious attacks on a network environment."
 

Cons

"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."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"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."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."
"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."
"Imperva always needs to adjust to new versions of cyber attacks, it needs to be faster, improve the resiliency of the software of the solution."
"Analytics in the area of risk need to be improved to supply more information to the users for creating better environments."
"Imperva now offers add-ons to add functionality, but I would like to see these included in the product, even if it would cost more."
"We had an issue when securing the web applications for DDoS protection."
"The product could use a broader scope in the area of policies."
"I would like to see automated reporting to improve visibility."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"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."
"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 price of the solution is expensive."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The price is reasonable."
Information not available
"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."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"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."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"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."
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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
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Insurance Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four...
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
It's a long way to be perfect, of course, as with all solutions. The main issue is integration with other parts or pr...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
There are two main use cases for Distributed Call Services: DDoS or Distributed attacks protection and WAF web applic...
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.
Information Not Available
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Imperva DDoS and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,959 professionals have used our research since 2012.