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Imperva DDoS vs Symantec Web Application Firewall comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
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)
Symantec Web Application Fi...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (44th)
 

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.
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.
reviewer1231533 - PeerSpot reviewer
An excellent up-to-date data repository handling external threats successfully
We have multiple applications that we wanted to ensure were protected and we chose Symantec for that. I'm the head of IT infrastructure and we are partners with Symantec.  Symantec has specifically helped connect external users to our internal network. It has also enabled us to ensure that those…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"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."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"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."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The solution has a very good interface."
"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."
"We have peace of mind that nobody will use malware on us or try to hack our website."
"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 dashboard is good and user-friendly."
"Imperva DDoS helps us automate production. The client had specific requirements for a cloud project in the financial sector."
"Imperva DDoS is fairly stable, and its availability is quite high."
"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."
"The solution has an up-to-date data repository to deal with external threats."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"The setup was straightforward."
 

Cons

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"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 solution needs to improve Integration with third parties for their on-prem deployment models. The integration is not that good yet."
"The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information."
"I would like to have support for SSL management and secure DNS."
"Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive."
"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."
"Incapsula services also provides load balancing services for their service IP address environment. So far, with monitoring their services, the IP address was only changed once."
"Analytics in the area of risk need to be improved to supply more information to the users for creating better environments."
"Sometimes scanning slows down the endpoints."
"I'm not convinced that it's necessary the best solution going forward in the future."
"It would be an improvement if the management dashboards were not reliant upon Java."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"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 pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"It is expensive."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"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."
"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"The solution's price is high for small companies."
Information not available
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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
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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...
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Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Incapsula
Symantec WAF, Blue Coat Protecting Web Applications
 

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.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva DDoS vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,253 professionals have used our research since 2012.