Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Imperva DDoS comparison

Fortinet and Imperva are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Fortinet is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0, while Imperva is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.3. Fortinet holds a 3.0% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Imperva’s 7.3% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Fortinet users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Imperva DDoS and Fortinet FortiDDoS are key players in the DDoS protection industry, known for their distinct strengths. Imperva DDoS appears to have the upper hand for businesses emphasizing cloud-based security due to its advanced real-time monitoring and ease of use. Conversely, Fortinet FortiDDoS shines in environments that demand high performance with hardware-backed solutions, making it ideal for large-scale, on-premises deployments.

Features:Imperva DDoS is notable for its advanced Web Application Firewall, real-time monitoring, and capability in the cloud environment. Key features include powerful caching controls, comprehensive bot management, and extensive analytics. Fortinet FortiDDoS stands out with its high-performance hardware technology designed to mitigate Layer 3, 4, and 7 DDoS attacks, handling high traffic volumes and providing robust protection.

Room for Improvement: Imperva DDoS could improve its reporting capabilities, enhance integration features, and address customer support responsiveness. Fortinet FortiDDoS users suggest enhancements in scalability, a need to streamline hardware reconfiguration for upgrades, and improved application traffic management features to broaden its protection scope.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Imperva DDoS predominantly supports cloud and hybrid environments, thus offering flexibility for cloud-centric organizations. Customer service receives mixed reviews, noting technical proficiency but some delays in responsiveness. Fortinet FortiDDoS typically requires on-premises deployment, attracting users with in-house capabilities but shares similar customer support challenges regarding service speed and accessibility.

Pricing and ROI:Imperva DDoS provides competitive pricing with licensing flexibility, favorable for enterprises with frequent attack profiles. It delivers good ROI without additional costs for DDoS absorption. Fortinet FortiDDoS, while affordable against alternatives, involves scalability challenges with significant costs for hardware upgrades, offering strong ROI for businesses needing robust on-premises defense against extensive attacks.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiDDoS vs. Imperva DDoS Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs. Imperva DDoS

January 2025

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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

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 Fortinet FortiDDoS is 3.0%, up from 2.8% 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

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.

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Yazan Omar

Systems Engineer at aic²

An easy-to-use tool with great GUI

The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.

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Syed Ubaid Ali Jafri

Head of Cyber Defense & Offensive Security at Habib Bank Limited

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's very user-friendly."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"The tool is user-friendly."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"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."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

More Cloudflare pros

"The most valuable feature is the cloud DDoS scrubbing capability."

"The product allows the users to adjust the thresholds."

"This solution can protect Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 attacks of applications for us."

"The solution already has security profiles and it can protect from DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks."

"The solution is very user-friendly and very easy to use."

"Among its key features: Detects and mitigates DDoS attacks at L3 to L7; negligible to zero false-positives; Generates and sends reports without the need for an expensive third-party solution."

"It is a user-friendly product in terms of monitoring and updating policies."

"It allows me to see all the traffic on my network."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS pros

"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."

"It is an effective threat mitigation tool."

"Provides Anti-DDoS protection, as well as other protections like SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and antiscanner. These types of protection are valuable to the business due to the daily attacks on our portals, and that often cannot be seen without a tool like this."

"Gives us the ability to trace each connection, and to have logs to be able to differentiate between a positive and a false-positive intruder action."

"The setup of Imperva DDoS was easy."

"Imperva DDoS helps us automate production. The client had specific requirements for a cloud project in the financial sector."

"We use Imperva DDoS to stop DDoS attacks and reduce the amount of unwanted queries against web services or web scraping."

"It fits our requirements, as well as our budget."

More Imperva DDoS pros

Cons

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

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

"Technical support is lacking."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"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."

"The documentation could improve 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

"The web interface could be much better."

"The only thing they need to do is to automate it. Today, you must create tools that do not require the use of an expert or anyone with special skills."

"The solution can be a little more user-friendly and it can be more affordable."

"There aren't really any aspects of the solution we are unhappy with. It's been a positive experience overall."

"The tool needs to focus more on the area of application traffic management, where it currently has some shortcomings."

"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."

"The challenge lies within the customer environment, particularly in Brazil, where companies have stringent security requirements for implementing solutions."

"Alerts and reporting features must be improved."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS cons

"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."

"There’s nothing that’s missing in terms of features."

"Analytics in the area of risk need to be improved to supply more information to the users for creating better environments."

"It would be beneficial to include vulnerability management in the solution, similar to what they have for their on-premise solution."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We faced issues regarding compliance with client procedures. The client had strict compliance rules, and Imperva needed to be on a VM, while the client required containerization, causing a conflict. They went with Imperva for the on-premise version but shelved the cloud project due to too many blockers."

More Imperva DDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"We are using the free version."

"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."

"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 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."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It's quite pricey."

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

"The solution is reasonably priced."

"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."

"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."

"The solution's price is high for small companies."

"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."

"The license is on a yearly basis."

"The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay."

"We are satisfied with the pricing."

"It is expensive."

More Imperva DDoS pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user68487

Security Expert with 51-200 employees

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would...

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What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's initial setup phase was really easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's pricing is comparable to other products.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Arbor DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 26% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 13% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Shield vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Azure DDoS Protection vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 5% of the time

More Fortinet FortiDDoS Competitors

Akamai vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 20% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 10% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 4% of the time

AWS Shield vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 2% of the time

More Imperva DDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

January 2025

Download Fortinet FortiDDoS product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva DDoS

January 2025

Download Imperva DDoS product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos

Imperva Incapsula

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

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are ever-evolving and use a variety of technologies. To successfully combat these attacks, you need a dynamic, multi-layered security solution. FortiDDoS protects from both known and zero day attacks with very low latency. It’s easy to deploy and manage, and includes comprehensive reporting and analysis tools.

Fortinet

Imperva DDoS is a solution that offers protection for web applications and websites and all their associated business-critical data from cyberattacks. The cloud-based application delivery service helps improve user experiences by improving their performance. Through its security platform, Imperva DDoS also provides DDoS mitigation, a web application firewall, and a global load balancer, and includes a content delivery network — all designed to maximize performance.

Imperva DDoS Features

Imperva DDoS has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

API security
Web application firewall
Bot management
Application delivery
Runtime protection (RASP)
Discovery and assessment
Data protection
Data risk analytics
Data privacy
Application delivery control (ADC)
Content delivery network (CDN)
DDoS mitigation
Global server load-balancing (GSLB)
Web application firewall (WAF)
Client-side protection
Runtime protection

Imperva DDoS Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing Imperva DDoS. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduce web application risk: Imperva DDoS includes automatic policy creation and fast rule propagation that give your IT and security departments the ability to use third-party code without risk while working at the pace of DevOps.

Security from edge to database: Imperva DDoS’s WAF feature secures from edge to database, so the traffic you receive is only the traffic you want.

Safeguard sensitive and personal data: Imperva DDoS provides visibility into sensitive and personal data, with the controls to protect that data and the ability to unify management across cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid environments to help accommodate changing threats, new regulations, and challenging audits.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Imperva DDoS users.

PeerSpot user, Etienne W., CDN & Cybersecurity Engineer - Web performance & security at CDN Tech / Ecritel, says, “It is a good solution that allows us to protect websites. It is stable, scalable, quick and easy to use.” He goes on to explain, “WAF protection works almost out-of-the-box. The Anti-DDoS mitigation in less than 1s, I saw it many times in production, I can say it works. CDN has high performances, and the Smart Caching mode is really "smart" (you can do some efficient caching even if you're not a specialist). Its unique interface for managing security performance and ease of use are the most valuable features of this solution."

An IT Senior Manager at an outsourcing company mentions, “The most valuable features are DDoS protection. The Incapsula [Imperva DDoS] environment helps us monitor all the web activity. All the web activity is passed through their WAF cloud services, then that can help us to monitor those activities. That can help protect against DDoS hacking.”

Another PeerSpot reviewer, Ben D., Sales Executive at EVVO LABS, comments, "Imperva Incapsula [DDoS] has many valuable features. One, it protects the top 10 OWASP vulnerability, the open web application software platform, this is standard. Secondly, it protects against broken authentication. As well, it has remote execution of code."

A Solutions Architect at a financial services firm states, “The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is easy to configure. The solution keeps itself up to date itself and there's no customization that we need to do. It makes it extremely easy and cuts back on the amount of work required, and saves us on man-hours.”

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.

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs. Imperva DDoS

January 2025

Free Report: Fortinet FortiDDoS vs. Imperva DDoS

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiDDoS vs. Imperva DDoS and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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