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Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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
7.1
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 Web Application Fir...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (6th)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
 

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.
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.
Sooryanarayan Hegde - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy management and configuration, affordable, and has good features
We use all the features. It is very useful. Using WAF, we can control the WAF rules based on our application requirements. We can control what rules should be used and what should be disabled. The role of the tool is limited to HTTP traffic. It does exactly what it must do. It's a regional service. We know how to use it for DR scenarios. WAF has been the most valuable in protecting applications. We use at least three instances in the back end to give the best performance for our applications. The management and configuration of the solution is quite easy. All certificate renewals are automatically taken care of by Key Vault.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"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 offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"The technical support is good."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The solution integrates seamlessly with other tools and has a good alert mechanism."
"The valuable features of Imperva WAF include its effective security breach prevention through automatically updating rules."
"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."
"It has fewer false positives"
"The solution can be configured in just a couple of minutes."
"We can prevent attacks or issues even before they happen."
"Compared to other web application firewalls in the market, Imperva does things in the most accurate way."
"It is easy to use and has good security."
"The pricing is quite good."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is an easy-to-use solution."
"We use the product in front-end and back-end applications to do the load balancing smartly."
"It has a filter available, although we are not currently using it because it is not part of our requirements. But it is a good option and when it becomes part of our requirements we will definitely use it."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the web application firewall (WAF)."
"The tool helps manage microservices by providing developers with a platform to conduct tests and assessments on the web application. The custom domain option is one of the most valuable features I've found. This feature is incredibly helpful for the end-users of the web application. With the custom domain feature, you can change the lengthy link to a shorter, more memorable one. For example, instead of using a lengthy default link, you can customize it to something like imail.com, which is much easier to remember and share."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is its ease of use."
"The simplicity of the solution and its ability to integrate easily with others are its most valuable aspects."
 

Cons

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"Support response time could be improved."
"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."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"DNS Management."
"I'd like the option to pick your bot protection."
"Sometimes, support tickets don't get addressed quickly."
"The Imperva Web Application Firewall automations are good, but there is still room for improvement with them."
"The support for the on-premises version needs improvement."
"They recently separated the WAF and the DAM management gateways in order for each of these to be managed from different areas, so I believe it now requires additional investments for what was previously a single complete solution."
"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the API integration. It was complex for us. Additionally, The onboarding could be better."
"The user interface could be better."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is harder to manage than Imperva. It is not intuitive and stable compared to other products."
"The solution has many limitations. You cannot upgrade the VPN to the application gateway. So I started with version one, which has limited capabilities, and they provided version two. And unfortunately, I cannot upgrade from v one to v two like other services. So I have to decommission the version one and create a new one with version two. Also the version one was complex with the certificates uploading the SQL certificates."
"The configuration is very specific right now and needs to be much more flexible."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is not scalable."
"Scalability can be an issue."
"The working speed of the solution needs improvement."
"Microsoft needs to work on their documentation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A free version of the solution is available."
"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."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"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 solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"We are using the free version."
"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."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."
"The solution's pricing is an issue."
"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."
"The tool is expensive."
"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."
"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."
"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."
"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."
"The pricing is based on how much you use the solution."
"I rate the price of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway an eight out of ten."
"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."
"The solution is paid monthly. The solution is highly expensive."
"We use the tool's basic subscription. Its licensing costs are monthly."
"The tool's pricing model is pay-as-you-go."
"Regarding pricing for Azure Application Gateway, I would rate it at seven."
"The cost is not an issue."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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.
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 ...
What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
 

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.
BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.