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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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
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
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (17th)
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 April 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.4%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.2%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 6.7%, down from 8.2% 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 simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"The UI is good."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Its initial setup process 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."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"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."
"The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition."
"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."
"The solution is very good at intercepting traffic before it gets to our data centers."
"Imperva DDoS is fairly stable, and its availability is quite high."
"The dashboard is good and user-friendly."
"Incapsula takes care of the CDN infrastructure and bandwidth volume, providing several enterprise "load balancing" features."
"They're quite easy to install and quite easy to set up. Clients really like that. Especially when you're dealing with the cloud, it's really easy."
 

Cons

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"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."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"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 documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"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."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"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."
"Support is not that great."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information."
"The cost could be lower; our end clients need to have a high budget to purchase this solution."
"I miss being able to integrate the dashboard with other BI tools we are using. We have to export and import data to be able to present it, and doing so is a lot of work."
"The product could use a broader scope in the area of policies."
"Certificate management could be improved."
"The solution needs to improve Integration with third parties for their on-prem deployment models. The integration is not that good yet."
"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 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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"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."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"The solution's price is high for small companies."
"The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay."
"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
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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
18%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
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
 

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: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.