Imperva DDoS vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

Imperva DDoS vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

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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

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.

I like the content monitoring feature which I haven't seen in other WAF solutions.

Syed Ubaid Ali Jafri

Head of Cyber Defense & Offensive Security at Habib Bank Limited

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.

Offers bot protection and DDoS Protection and protects public-facing portals

Abdullah Jin

Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Support is one thing I wish Imperva could improve. They follow the phone model and keep rotating you from one customer service person to another. The layer one support isn't very clear about the workings of the product. My feedback is primarily about Imperva Cloud, not on-premise. On-premise is a whole new story. Support is the issue for Imperva Cloud. It's also a bit pricey. It's a premium service and very expensive. The licensing model is not very straightforward. Every feature is priced separately, and to enjoy maximum protection, you'll have to spend a lot of money. The licensing model is a bit complex, and each feature is very pricey. For example, API security and web application protection are two separate license packages.

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

More Cloudflare pros

"Setup was straightforward, very simple. I only entered the domain and Incapsula returned the DNS data that I needed to change for the protection to be configured."

"It blocks all types of attacks."

"The most valuable features are DDoS protection."

"It is a stable solution."

"Its unique interface for managing security performance and ease of use are the most valuable features of this solution."

"The solution has a very good interface."

"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."

"Real-time monitoring is also a great tool, as you may watch several parameters in real time."

More Imperva DDoS pros

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is stable."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a highly stable solution and is very mature."

"It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications."

"The most valuable features of the Imperva Web Application Firewall are DDoS, malware, and the other malicious threat prevention it provides. Additionally, third-party integration is available. You can forward the log for further analysis."

"There is a quick switch between any of the the nodes if something goes wrong, where there's a there's an attack against a specific area. The security setup is reasonably easy. It's not a problem to do setups and rules and integrations. And, yeah, just the the back end team is also very willing to insist if there's questions that that we cannot answer or with these questions that we do have"

"The solution can be configured in just a couple of minutes."

"If you are using the appliance as opposed to the virtual deployment, it can stand as the network layer-two and provide real transparency."

"It works right out of the box once you integrate the application."

Cons

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"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."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"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 pricing could be improved."

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

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

More Cloudflare cons

"The rules surrounding the making of web applications could be improved."

"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."

"We had an issue when securing the web applications for DDoS protection."

"Imperva DDoS does not provide version control."

"The solution should integrate with something that looks at continuous security management."

"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."

"Imperva should have more points of presence in Africa."

"It's quite expensive."

More Imperva DDoS cons

"One potential improvement for Imperva is enhancing its alert system."

"There could be some limitations that from the converged infrastructure perspective: when you want to converge with everything and you want Imperva to get there easily because it's not a cloud component. For example, when you want to build servers and you're using OneView to manage your software-defined networks, implementing Imperva right away is not that simple. But if you're doing just a simple cloud infrastructure with servers in there, you're good to go. Also, we are not able, with Imperva, to block by signatures. Imperva by itself needs to be complemented with another service to do URL filtering."

"Sometimes our web application firewall will slow down."

"It's a complicated tool to keep."

"It would be useful if the solution used more intelligence in attack protection. For example, firewalls are to be dependent on the configuration, but if they could have some data science around it the solution would be even better. The profiling of the traffic, and making decisions surrounding that should be intelligence-based, instead of being based on the configuration of the firewall itself."

"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."

"Sometimes, support tickets don't get addressed quickly."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by providing better features, such as improved prevention of zero-day attacks. Additionally, it should include a VR meta-analysis."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"A free version of the solution is available."

"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."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

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

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The license is on a yearly basis."

"Pricing could be more competitive."

"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."

"We are satisfied with the pricing."

"It is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category."

"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."

"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."

More Imperva DDoS pricing and cost advice

"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the price."

"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."

"There are some licenses that you have to buy to use some features. Its price could be better. Price is always important because, at the end of the day, customers have a budget. If you can meet the budget, you can sell, and if you don't, you cannot sell."

"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."

"It is very costly, but the return on investment is very high. Its cost was around $70,000, and we got it back in just six months."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."

"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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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…

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

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 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...

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

My recommendation is Imperva.

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...

DDoS solutions: Any other solutions to consider aside from Radware DDoS Protection Service and F5 Silverline DDoS Protection?

You can have a look to Imperva Cloud WAF, the anti-DDoS mitigation is under 1s and works very well. I observed a lot ...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Akamai vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 20% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 9% 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

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 3% of the time

More Imperva DDoS Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 17% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

Radware Alteon vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Imperva DDoS

Download Imperva DDoS product report

Imperva Web Application Firewall

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Imperva Incapsula

No data available

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

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

Imperva Web Application Firewall is a versatile solution that protects web applications and databases from various attacks, including DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks. It offers data security, availability, and access control and can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud.

The solution has good security against web attacks and offers advanced bot protection, API security, and mitigation features. Imperva WAF is easy to configure and deploy; it has good customer service and an excellent user interface.

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.

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

BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens

Imperva DDoS vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall