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Imperva DDoS vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Imperva DDoS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (9th)
Imperva Web Application Fir...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (6th)
 

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.
DerrickAkankwasa - PeerSpot reviewer
Provide DDoS protection and better security at effective rate
It is expanding its number of data centers for scrubbing traffic. Currently, there is only one POP for cleaning in South Africa. They might add another POP in North Africa, possibly in Nigeria or Egypt. Latency concerns customers, especially in regions like East and West Africa, where traffic has to travel to South Africa before returning. Increasing the number of POPs across the continent would help address these latency issues and improve overall service. While the platform is already quite strong, there’s always room for improvement, especially in keeping up with emerging trends and new types of attacks. Enhancing security capabilities could be beneficial. Integrating more advanced AI features could significantly improve its effectiveness and help customers leverage these tools more effectively. It would be great to see more focus on AI integration to handle and analyze data more efficiently.
Abdullah Jin - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers bot protection and DDoS Protection and protects public-facing portals
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"The UI is good."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The most valuable features are DDoS protection."
"Imperva DDoS is fairly stable, and its availability is quite high."
"This product is a reliable defense from malicious attacks on a network environment."
"Simplifies putting everything in code."
"Its unique interface for managing security performance and ease of use are the most valuable features of this solution."
"​Technical support provides good, quick responses."
"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."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of Imperva, in addition to its strong knowledge base, is its effective protection for web applications."
"It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications."
"There are many features. There is ease of deployment. You can deploy the Imperva Web Application Firewall in two to three minutes. After that, you have to set the policies. For setting policies, you have toggle buttons. You can turn something on or off."
"The WAF itself has been very valuable to me because it has such a complete range of features. Another reason why I like it is because it also takes care of the total overview of the traffic over the network."
"The features I have found most valuable with Imperva Web Application Firewall are account takeover protection, advanced bot protection, and API security."
"The solution has been quite stable. I have not seen any bugs at all."
"It is easy to use and has good security."
"The solution is very scalable. It is one of the most important features. You can also expand resources and features as well."
 

Cons

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"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's console should be made more user-friendly."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"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."
"A limited tool if you're looking to customize."
"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."
"I am not sure if this application has a policy where you can create your custom policy and run it as our firewall. We should have some ability to also create some custom policy, then run it as a firewall."
"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."
"It would be beneficial to include vulnerability management in the solution, similar to what they have for their on-premise solution."
"The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information."
"The process to upgrade from one version to another can be a lot simpler than it is currently."
"I would like the solution to improve its support response time."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the console by making it easier to use."
"The tool's UI is complicated. It would be best to have a more accessible UI dashboard to make the job easier."
"I loved the approach of the cloud. The cloud has a lot of new features, like advanced web protection and DDoS protection. If those could also be on-boarded onto the on-prem versions, that would be ideal. They need to pay attention to both deployment options and not just favor one."
"The only disadvantage of Imperva is that it is a pretty costly solution."
"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."
"It would be helpful to have a "recommended deployment", or even a list of basic features that should either be used or turned on by default."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"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 give the price a five out of ten."
"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."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"The solution's price is high for small companies."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"It is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category."
"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."
"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."
"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."
"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."
"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."
"It is a very affordable solution."
"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."
"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
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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 - 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
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
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 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...
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 DefensePro 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 ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Incapsula
No data available
 

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.
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva DDoS vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.