Imperva Web Application Firewall vs NetScaler comparison

Imperva and NetScaler are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Imperva is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.9, while NetScaler is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.3. Additionally, 97% of Imperva users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of NetScaler users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Imperva Web Application Firewall and NetScaler based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. NetScaler Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. NetScaler

December 2024

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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.

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Abdullah Jin

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

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.

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DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU

Cloud Consultant at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking

Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

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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

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"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."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

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

"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 DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

More Cloudflare pros

"The tool's profiling feature maps all the web application directories and related components on the profile directory. It has improved the security of my client's website applications."

"Very intuitive and granular configuration - It does not require much time, or advanced knowledge, for configuration and maintenance."

"The solution is very scalable. It is one of the most important features. You can also expand resources and features as well."

"The solution has been quite stable. I have not seen any bugs at all."

"The features I have found most valuable with Imperva Web Application Firewall are account takeover protection, advanced bot protection, and API security."

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

"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."

"Compared to other web application firewalls in the market, Imperva does things in the most accurate way."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

"The most valuable features are for the ADMs and the overall monitoring environment."

"I like the ease of use. It's easy to manage. I also like it's ease of use with virtualization technologies with applications."

"The solution improves security performance."

"The solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature."

"High availability, performance, and security are the main pillars. It enhances the security for accessing the applications."

"The load balancing is one of the most valuable features."

"The solution can be configured very granularly and has good control over security."

"One of the most beneficial features for application delivery is its integration with Citrix Storefront, facilitating user logins and ensuring continuity during data center outages."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"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."

"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."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

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

"The pricing could be improved."

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

More Cloudflare cons

"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."

"The tool's UI is complicated. It would be best to have a more accessible UI dashboard to make the job easier."

"I would like to improve the tool's turnaround time in terms of support."

"The signature updates could be faster. Sometimes we have to upload signatures to the Imperva portal for checking and analysis before we can use them."

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

"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."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a good system, but we found that the visibility of the diverse-path server, e.g. where the traffic is coming from, the different IPs, etc., needs improvement."

"It is complicated to integrate the solution's on-cloud version with other platforms."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

"The solution should be able to scale more effectively than it does."

"We had some bugs in the previous firmware. These were not big issues, but more testing on the firmware would be key to happier customers."

"We are looking for some in-depth monitoring and analytics and more information that Citrix Director doesn't provide. ControlUp has insights that not only give you an overview but also allow you to do some drill-down troubleshooting for what's going on in your environment. We are looking for some more analytical and monitoring data to be able to monitor the environment better, not only from an application standpoint but also from the standpoint of the infrastructure to everything it sits on. They can provide more data to the administrators about what's going on within the application. They can provide data not only on the application side but also about what the application sits on. They're making strides with Citrix Analytics in regards to that."

"In every release - and it doesn't matter if it's a minor release or a major release - they keep moving things around and they keep changing the mechanism. So certain things can work in one version one way, and everything works really well, then when you upgrade it to the next version, it breaks everything because they have a new way of doing it."

"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."

"Getting to use some of the advanced tools, even with the assistance of Citrix support, can be challenging."

"Manageability and adaptability can also be challenging for end customers."

"Should offer more flexible cost-effective licensing for small to medium sized organizations."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

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

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"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."

"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."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is a very affordable solution."

"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."

"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."

"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."

"The tool is expensive."

"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 solution's pricing is an issue."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"Licensing is adequate. I wanted to have a more prominent license, but until I do they don't give enough support. The additional cost would be too much."

"Its licensing cost is much higher than other products, but it is acceptable because it is a one-time investment, and we are getting our requirements fulfilled when we buy this product. So, there is no issue with the pricing."

"In Turkey, everything is good, but it seems expensive for us due to the currency exchange. I don't have a specific rating scale, but if I had to rate the price, I would say it's around a six out of ten."

"Citrix ADC could improve the price and make it less expensive, other competitors have a better prices. This would allow Citrix ADC to keep dominating the market."

"The pricing could be lower."

"This product is more expensive than some of the competitors."

"The license for Citrix NetScaler is on an annual basis and it is reasonably priced."

"Citrix Web App and API Protection are in the middle when we talk about pricing and licensing"

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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

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823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

12%

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...

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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...

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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.

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

My recommendation is Imperva.

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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...

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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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Citrix ADC?

The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic ente...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADC?

After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexi...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 48% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 17% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 15% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 15% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs NetScaler

Compared 13% of the time

HAProxy vs NetScaler

Compared 10% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler

Compared 10% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

December 2024

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

December 2024

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

November 2024

Download NetScaler product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall

Learn More

Cloudflare

Imperva

NetScaler

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

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.

One platform for a consistent application delivery and security experience because nobody has time to learn multiple systems to manage ADC deployments. NetScaler is built with a single code base using a software-based architecture, so no matter which ADC form factor you choose — hardware, virtual machine, bare metal, or container — the behavior will be the same.

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

ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. NetScaler

December 2024

Free Report: Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. NetScaler

Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. NetScaler and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

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823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.