AWS Shield vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Imperva are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.7, while Imperva is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.4. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 4.9% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Imperva’s 7.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

AWS Shield

Read 11 AWS Shield reviews

1,995 Views
1,995 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Imperva Application Securit...

Read 133 Imperva Application Security Platform reviews

9,706 Views
3,106 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

AWS Shield

Imperva Application Securit...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 21, 2025

Imperva Application Security Platform and AWS Shield both compete in the cybersecurity sector, specifically offering protection against web-based threats. Imperva appears to have the upper hand due to its extensive feature set and integration options, catering more comprehensively to security needs.

Features: Imperva offers features such as a Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, real-time traffic analysis, and security intelligence. It provides extensive customization and integration capabilities. AWS Shield is valued for its ease of use and effective DDoS protection, making it simple to deploy in cloud environments. While useful, AWS lacks some of the advanced security features provided by Imperva.

Room for Improvement: Users recommend that Imperva enhance customer support, reporting features, and traffic analytics. There's also a call for more transparent licensing and UI improvements. AWS Shield could improve dashboard visibility and should consider offering more advanced features from the Shield Advanced in the standard version. Both platforms could benefit from better threat reporting and customization options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Imperva offers various deployment options, including cloud and on-premises solutions, though on-premises setups can be complex. AWS Shield is praised for its straightforward integration within AWS environments. While customer service is generally positive for both platforms, Imperva's support receives mixed reviews on responsiveness, whereas AWS Shield is appreciated for reliable support and resource availability.

Pricing and ROI: Imperva is seen as more expensive, but its comprehensive features justify its cost, offering strong ROI in high-risk environments. Its pricing is flexible but potentially high for added features. AWS Shield offers a straightforward, scalable pricing model, especially beneficial for organizations deeply integrated within AWS. However, costs for advanced features can accumulate rapidly.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Shield vs. Imperva Application Security Platform Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Imperva Application Security Platform

December 2025

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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

AWS Shield

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Imperva Application Securit...

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

133

Ranking in other categories

CDN (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th), Bot Management (1st), API Security (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of AWS Shield is 4.9%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 7.8%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Imperva Application Security Platform	7.8%
AWS Shield	4.9%
Other	87.3%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

PranavTelang

Lead Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Has enabled multi-layered threat mitigation but still lacks deeper visibility for advanced application attacks

AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods. It does not provide inherent protection against more sophisticated layer 7 attacks such as HTTP floods. In such cases, integration with WAF is necessary, which results in additional costs for customers. To protect layer 7, layer 4, and layer 3, customers must implement both solutions. The service also has difficulties with static detection thresholds, which may not be sensitive enough to detect smaller application-specific attacks. While AWS Shield is a key security service, AWS should enhance their expert support with 24/7 response for complex attacks, which is currently limited.

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reviewer1247523

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.

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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

"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."

"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."

"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."

"AWS Shield offers numerous protection features that are crucial at the application layer, safeguarding users from distributed denial of service attacks, man-in-the-middle assaults, and hacker orchestrations."

"It is quite scalable, and we have not faced any issues with its scalability."

"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."

"AWS Shield is aligned with the web application firewall (WAF), and they work seamlessly together, primarily working with Elastic Load Balancer, CloudFront, and Route 53 for CDN and DNS services protection."

"The product is easy to use."

More AWS Shield pros

"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."

"Imperva is a Gartner leader, so its scalability, performance, and features are excellent."

"The technical support is excellent."

"It fits our requirements, as well as our budget."

"The most valuable features of Imperva Web Application Firewall are the monitoring of databases and the dashboards are easy to understand."

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

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a highly stable solution and is very mature."

"The dashboard is good and user-friendly."

More Imperva Application Security Platform pros

Cons

"The product is expensive."

"The management of it is a bit hard. If you don't engineer it on the front side, it is hard to go back in and change it. It could be improved in terms of architecture requirements and then ongoing support requirements as a secondary component to it. People tend to set up things like this, and they just expect it to work without the care and feeding that needs to go back into it either from an application team or a network environment team."

"AWS Shield Standard requires improvement, particularly regarding its dashboard since it currently provides limited coverage against comprehensive DDoS attacks."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced."

"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."

"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."

"AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a situation is normal or abnormal."

More AWS Shield cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The Imperva Web Application Firewall automations are good, but there is still room for improvement with them."

"It should be more user-friendly. Like other web solutions, it would be helpful to be able to easily do policy configuration and identification inside the application. Understanding the in-depth configuration of a policy is somewhat difficult for an engineer, and they can improve that."

"If they can bring in generative AI features, that would be useful."

"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."

"The product could use a broader scope in the area of policies."

More Imperva Application Security Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cheap."

"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."

"It depends on your subscription level and the volume that you're spending with AWS. So, it is very relative to the consumption alignment in your subscription level. It is a well-constructed, scalable pricing option, but it is relative to how much you're spending on AWS. Because the more you spend, typically, the more you get off on services like this. I find it to be comparable to other solutions."

"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."

"The tool's pricing is good."

"It is a very affordable solution."

"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."

"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 cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."

"The tool's pricing is good."

"It is expensive."

"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."

"The solution's price is high for small companies."

More Imperva Application Security Platform pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.

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Comparison Review

it_user68487

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	83
Midsize Enterprise	25
Large Enterprise	61

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS Shield?

We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, whi...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Shield?

The pricing structure for AWS Shield is fair, yet it depends on the specific protections chosen. Enabling Shield Advanced on multiple services such as CloudFront, network load balancer, or Route 53...

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What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

Services always benefit from improvements, including AWS Shield. With respect to the Web Application Firewall, current rule-based setups may not be adequately defined or classified. Enhancement of ...

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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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Cloudflare vs AWS Shield

Compared 24% of the time

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 20% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 16% of the time

Radware DDoS vs AWS Shield

Compared 8% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs AWS Shield

Compared 5% of the time

More AWS Shield Competitors

Cloudflare vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Akamai vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 6% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 4% of the time

More Imperva Application Security Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

January 2026

Download AWS Shield product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Application Security Platform

January 2026

Imperva Application Security Platform report

Download Imperva Application Security Platform product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Imperva Application Security Platform delivers comprehensive and continuous web threat protection. Renowned for its ease of use, it shields web applications and databases from various cyber threats while integrating seamlessly with cloud and on-premises environments.

Imperva Application Security Platform protects web environments by offering advanced security measures against threats like DDoS attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting. As a robust web application firewall, it provides extensive monitoring and bot management capabilities. The platform integrates content delivery networks for enhanced performance and scalability, while real-time traffic analysis ensures consistent protection. Despite its strengths, improvements can be made in policy management and customization options. Users seek better integration with third-party tools and more competitive pricing models. The inclusion of AI for enhanced analytics is also anticipated.

What are the key features of Imperva Application Security Platform?

Correlated Attack Validation: Enhances threat assessment by linking related security events.
Threat Radar: Offers visibility into potential and ongoing threats.
Virtual Patching: Provides protection against vulnerabilities without immediate code changes.
IncapRules: Allows creation of custom security policies.
DDoS Protection: Defends against large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks.
CDN Integration: Improves content delivery speed and reliability.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

User-Friendly Administration: Simplifies setup and ongoing management tasks.
Seamless Integration: Ensures smooth operation with existing infrastructure.
Comprehensive Threat Protection: Shields digital assets from a wide range of threats.
Hands-On Support: Provides timely and effective customer service assistance.

Imperva Application Security Platform is implemented in industries needing strong database and application protection. Companies use it to enforce geolocation restrictions and manage bots, benefiting sectors like finance and e-commerce where data security and threat monitoring are critical. Its ability to protect and ensure data accessibility makes it integral to business operations prioritizing cyber resilience.

Imperva

Sample Customers

netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code

Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Imperva Application Security Platform

December 2025

Free Report: AWS Shield vs. Imperva Application Security Platform

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