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Akamai API Security vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 21, 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

Akamai API Security
Ranking in API Security
1st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in API Security
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
133
Ranking in other categories
CDN (2nd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Bot Management (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the API Security category, the mindshare of Akamai API Security is 9.5%, down from 20.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 8.6%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Security Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Akamai API Security9.5%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.6%
Other81.9%
API Security
 

Featured Reviews

RR
Incident Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Unified API visibility has transformed governance and now supports compliance reporting
The tool is blocking and only the person who has access to the tool can actually see how many DDoS attacks were blocked. Since I do not log in to the portal myself, I am unaware of this capability. I heard the word Akamai's anomaly detection from my team that they use this, but I don't know about it on the technical aspect. I am unaware of Akamai API Security's ability to adjust security policies in real-time. I am also unaware of which feature of Akamai API Security has helped us monitor API usage trends. Someone who is actually hands-on using Akamai API Security might know this.
reviewer1247523 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Solution ensures website availability and proactive threat mitigation
Over the seven years, the most valuable features of Imperva DDoS that I have found are related to DDoS attacks, which are a group of attacks, and not all of them can be resolved on the endpoint level before the website. Using the web firewall before the website is a common use case to protect against malicious requests to the website. I have utilized Imperva's Intelligent Traffic Filtering feature. This feature helps me understand how the attack is progressing and what is happening inside the requests to our website. It allows me to granularly grant or deny access to certain parts of our website. This helps when we know our customers and the types of requests that can be sent from them, enabling us to block some malicious requests. Imperva DDoS has User Behavior Analytics and Threat Intelligence on its board, and this helps us to be protected proactively. Imperva DDoS connects to its database of threats, storing whole information about attacks all over the world in one simple engine. Everyone can use this feature, which can connect to this engine and get information about what is going on at the world level. That is the way to be protected at the company's level. The integration capabilities of Imperva DDoS are very easy and simple. We can run it in 2 hours.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its integration with API gateways, WAP and with part of their SDLC."
"The support from Akamai API Security is good, the employment and support are of excellent quality."
"The API part is effective."
"API throttling is the most valuable feature of Akamai API Security."
"Akamai API Security has made a positive difference for our organization by improving our security posture and saving our team time, as we can actually prioritize tasks unless there are some false positives, but it is definitely saving a lot of time."
"What I already appreciate about Akamai API Security is that initially we were struggling with how to get this configured, but after that everything went smoothly."
"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"
"It blocks all types of attacks."
"It has fewer false positives"
"Protection is the best solution since it has profile functionality."
"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."
"Data masking is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"Imperva is easy to use and deploy. The UI is excellent."
"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."
 

Cons

"More features would be beneficial."
"I think it would be good if they can integrate more with API gateways as this is currently limited."
"The challenge I found was with contextualization and how analytics are generated."
"It would be beneficial to use machine learning and API throttling together to identify how the APIs are called and whether it's coming from the right person or the wrong person."
"The main challenges we had with Akamai API Security were how to set it up on the AWS cloud environment and how to access this portal."
"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."
"Users would benefit from better documentation. There is official documentation, but sometimes we need more detail. We have some use cases that are not so run of the mill. It would be great if there was a knowledge base that we could go to for more answers."
"An improvement for Imperva WAF would be to reduce the number of false positives and create more strong use cases based on AI/ML or behavioral analytics."
"It would be beneficial to include vulnerability management in the solution, similar to what they have for their on-premise solution."
"Certificate management could be improved."
"The solution should integrate with something that looks at continuous security management."
"It is complicated to integrate the solution's on-cloud version with other platforms."
"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a limit to the number of APIs we can use inside a bundle, and we have to pay extra if we exceed that limit."
"It is a very affordable solution."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."
"There are a couple of different licensing models."
"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."
"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."
"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business83
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise61
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai API Security?
It is not expensive. It is practical to use and represents an excellent solution.
What is your primary use case for Akamai API Security?
I use Akamai API Security. I downloaded a report comparing WAF Akamai and WAF Azure to understand the real differences. I studied the solution to comprehend how it detects bots. For example, with A...
Which Web Application Firewall (WAF) would you recommend? R&S or Imperva?
Imperva is a strong choice, given their security focus and ongoing R&D into the product in areas such as bot management.
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, setup costs, and licensing of Imperva DDoS are reasonable for the amount of technical capabilities provided. I would rate the pricing of Imperva DDoS as five, where one is very cheap a...
 

Also Known As

Noname Security
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai API Security vs. Imperva Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.