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Fastly vs Imperva DDoS comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
6th
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th)
Imperva DDoS
Ranking in CDN
7th
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.7%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.0%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 7.3%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

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.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support
The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.
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 most valuable features of the solution are performance and 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."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Imperva Incapsula has many valuable features. One, it protects the top 10 OWAS vulnerability, the open web application software platform, this is standard. Secondly, it protects against broken authentication. As well, it has remote execution of code."
"There are quite a few useful Imperva Incapsula features. For example, one of them is the reports. The graphics are very good and it's easy to configure. The whole process is very fast and reliable too. They have good tech support as well."
"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."
"The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition."
"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."
"Integration with IBM AS/400 and Db2 is okay."
"Imperva DDoS is fairly stable, and its availability is quite high."
 

Cons

"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"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."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"Support response time could be improved."
"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."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"Technical support is lacking."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"Support is not that great."
"We would like them to hire people in Sweden because it's quite hard when people are sitting in the UK or Belgium because some of the customers really want them to be local."
"The product could use a broader scope in the area of policies."
"Imperva should have more points of presence in Africa."
"Certificate management could be improved."
"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."
"It needs to be improved every time there are new attacks."
"The solution should integrate with something that looks at continuous security management."
"Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"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."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"It is an expensive solution."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"It is expensive."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
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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
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

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 Fastly?
Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...
What needs improvement with Fastly?
What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

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.
Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. Imperva DDoS and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.