AWS Shield vs Imperva DDoS 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 #6 with an average rating of 8.4, while Imperva is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 6.9% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Imperva’s 6.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Imperva DDoS and AWS Shield are competing products in the domain of distributed denial-of-service attack protection. AWS Shield holds an advantage due to its seamless integration with AWS infrastructure, making it more appealing to AWS-centered businesses, while Imperva DDoS gains preference for pricing flexibility and superior support.

Features: Imperva DDoS offers real-time security updates, comprehensive multi-layered attack defense, and robust threat detection and mitigation. Complementing AWS services, AWS Shield provides automatic protection, requires no customer intervention, and features advanced attack analytics. Each product effectively caters to its user base, with AWS Shield benefiting AWS users through native integration.

Room for Improvement: Imperva DDoS could enhance its integration with third-party infrastructures, improve its user interface for easier navigation, and speed up the deployment process. AWS Shield could benefit from expanding its protection scope outside the AWS ecosystem, making its user interface more accessible to those unfamiliar with AWS, and offering more detailed reporting options for non-AWS integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Shield stands out with its straightforward deployment, especially advantageous for AWS users due to minimal latency and automatic protection features. Imperva DDoS offers enhanced deployment support with a dedicated team, appealing to users needing extra assistance. While AWS Shield's integration benefits AWS clients, Imperva shines with accessible customer service for guidance.

Pricing and ROI: Imperva DDoS provides competitive pricing with flexible plans, catering to businesses with evolving needs, possibly offering a lower overall cost. AWS Shield, bundled with AWS services, delivers value within the AWS framework with predictable costs and potentially higher ROI for AWS users. Although AWS Shield's cost-effectiveness suits existing AWS customers, Imperva might offer more economical options for businesses with varied needs.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Shield vs. Imperva DDoS Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Imperva DDoS

April 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

Cloudflare

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.6%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 6.9%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 6.5%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

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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Manikandan-R

Senior Project Manager at Synopsys Inc

Solution provides essential protection with good support and a simple setup

I have noticed a pattern developing in approximately five minutes. If it were possible to provide these patterns with historical data spanning six months, three months, or two months directly from the console, it would be extremely beneficial. It would allow for easy inquiries and facilitate the retrieval of relevant parts without having to manually check logs or examine movements. Instead, if all historical data were available, I could consult six months' worth of identified patterns efficiently through AWS without relying on external sources. This solution is particularly suitable for startups or medium-sized startups. I would rate the overall solution eight out of ten.

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Syed Ubaid Ali Jafri

Head of Cyber Defense & Offensive Security at Habib Bank Limited

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.

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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

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

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

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."

"It's very user-friendly."

More Cloudflare pros

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

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

"The solution operates smoothly at its baseline level, and we do not encounter any issues at that level."

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

"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, which is crucial for us. It's easy to use and set up and stops attacks on our servers. We haven't encountered any attack problems because the solution stops them in real-time. AWS Shield specifically focuses on defending against denial-of-service attacks, making it a great solution for that type of threat."

"The product is easy to use."

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

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

"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."

"The solution is very good at intercepting traffic before it gets to our data centers."

"On the activity log, I can see the exact details, the visit, and the threat."

"It is an effective threat mitigation tool."

"The setup of Imperva DDoS was easy."

"The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition."

"Real-time monitoring is also a great tool, as you may watch several parameters in real time."

"It blocks all types of attacks."

More Imperva DDoS pros

Cons

"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."

"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

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

"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."

"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 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."

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

More Cloudflare cons

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

"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."

"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."

"The product is expensive."

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

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

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

"The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."

"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."

"I would like to have support for SSL management and secure DNS."

"I would like to see automated reporting to improve visibility."

"The weakest point of Imperva is their first level of support, which should be improved. They should also improve the access and security logs viewing directly on the portal. I would like to see better access and security logs through the portal and not only through a SIM solution. Currently, if you want to explore your access and security logs from Imperva, you need a SIM tool or a SIM infrastructure on your side to do it. You can't do it manually or directly through the portal, which is a big problem for us. I had a call yesterday with Imperva for the roadmap, and I just told them this. They agreed that this is an improvement point from their side."

"The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information."

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

"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."

More Imperva DDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"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."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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 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."

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

"The tool is cheap."

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

"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."

"It is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category."

"Pricing could be more competitive."

"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."

"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."

"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."

"It is expensive."

More Imperva DDoS pricing and cost advice

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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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 de...

See all answers

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

The tool is cheap.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a si...

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 is rated a ten on a scale where ten is very expensive. The solution is only cloud-based and does not prov...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 24% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 19% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs AWS Shield

Compared 4% of the time

Prolexic vs AWS Shield

Compared 4% of the time

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Akamai vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 19% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 9% of the time

Radware DDoS vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 4% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 3% of the time

More Imperva DDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

May 2025

Download AWS Shield product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva DDoS

April 2025

Download Imperva DDoS product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Imperva Incapsula

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

Cloudflare

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 DDoS is a solution that offers protection for web applications and websites and all their associated business-critical data from cyberattacks. The cloud-based application delivery service helps improve user experiences by improving their performance. Through its security platform, Imperva DDoS also provides DDoS mitigation, a web application firewall, and a global load balancer, and includes a content delivery network — all designed to maximize performance.

Imperva DDoS Features

Imperva DDoS has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

API security
Web application firewall
Bot management
Application delivery
Runtime protection (RASP)
Discovery and assessment
Data protection
Data risk analytics
Data privacy
Application delivery control (ADC)
Content delivery network (CDN)
DDoS mitigation
Global server load-balancing (GSLB)
Web application firewall (WAF)
Client-side protection
Runtime protection

Imperva DDoS Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing Imperva DDoS. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduce web application risk: Imperva DDoS includes automatic policy creation and fast rule propagation that give your IT and security departments the ability to use third-party code without risk while working at the pace of DevOps.

Security from edge to database: Imperva DDoS’s WAF feature secures from edge to database, so the traffic you receive is only the traffic you want.

Safeguard sensitive and personal data: Imperva DDoS provides visibility into sensitive and personal data, with the controls to protect that data and the ability to unify management across cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid environments to help accommodate changing threats, new regulations, and challenging audits.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Imperva DDoS users.

PeerSpot user, Etienne W., CDN & Cybersecurity Engineer - Web performance & security at CDN Tech / Ecritel, says, “It is a good solution that allows us to protect websites. It is stable, scalable, quick and easy to use.” He goes on to explain, “WAF protection works almost out-of-the-box. The Anti-DDoS mitigation in less than 1s, I saw it many times in production, I can say it works. CDN has high performances, and the Smart Caching mode is really "smart" (you can do some efficient caching even if you're not a specialist). Its unique interface for managing security performance and ease of use are the most valuable features of this solution."

An IT Senior Manager at an outsourcing company mentions, “The most valuable features are DDoS protection. The Incapsula [Imperva DDoS] environment helps us monitor all the web activity. All the web activity is passed through their WAF cloud services, then that can help us to monitor those activities. That can help protect against DDoS hacking.”

Another PeerSpot reviewer, Ben D., Sales Executive at EVVO LABS, comments, "Imperva Incapsula [DDoS] has many valuable features. One, it protects the top 10 OWASP vulnerability, the open web application software platform, this is standard. Secondly, it protects against broken authentication. As well, it has remote execution of code."

A Solutions Architect at a financial services firm states, “The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is easy to configure. The solution keeps itself up to date itself and there's no customization that we need to do. It makes it extremely easy and cuts back on the amount of work required, and saves us on man-hours.”

Imperva

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

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 DDoS

April 2025

Free Report: AWS Shield vs. Imperva DDoS

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. Imperva DDoS and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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