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Cloudflare vs Imperva Application Security Platform vs NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare14.9%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.3%
Arbor DDoS7.8%
Other69.0%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Imperva Application Security Platform8.3%
Cloudflare14.9%
Arbor DDoS7.8%
Other69.0%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall0.6%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.6%
Fortinet FortiWeb6.5%
Other85.3%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
ST
Senior Cybersecurity Consultant at Cyberoutcome Limited
Strong policies and bot defenses have secured critical APIs and have reduced attack noise
From my research regarding the IAM space that Imperva Application Security Platform is trying to look into, I believe they still need to do a lot of modeling and modification to make sure that also helps. There are several competitors in the IAM space, so Imperva would do well if they can do some basic modeling and modifications from my own personal research and my own experience in the IAM space. Alternatively, they could actually just focus on trying to be stronger in the web application space and the database activity monitoring space.The main reason it is not a perfect ten is regarding support. At times, having to reach the support team takes eight hours to ten hours maximum. There are times when clients could have urgent issues to attend to. The support team could do more by having a faster response rate.
it_user933945 - PeerSpot reviewer
Desktop Engineer at eros international media ltd
Offers Application Protection Against Web Attacks
There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support on offer is excellent; they are very helpful and responsive, and we are quite happy with the level of service they provide to their customers."
"DDoS protection is this product’s most valuable feature."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"CloudFlare's caching brings the load speed down from 4.32 seconds to 2.45 seconds."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"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."
"The solution is cloud-based and offers us good uptime. It has combined web and API security. Therefore, with one license, you access both application security and also API security."
"This product is a reliable defense from malicious attacks on a network environment."
"Incapsula can help to hide the real origin and provide access control over different pages, and it can protect the website from being attacked."
"The dashboard is good and user-friendly."
"Hands down, the WAF is the most valuable feature; being able to identify, block, whitelist or blacklist as needed, are all valuable."
"The solution is a leader in the market and is easy to use."
"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."
"Our ROI is about 45% since deployment on reduction of our cloud bill."
"We really appreciate the hybrid security abilities; we get powerful protection for our application needs."
"Since we are using this tool for protection purposes we really appreciate the hybrid security abilities; the main idea here is that we powerful protection our application needs."
 

Cons

"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."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"Flexible SSL is nothing more than an illusion of security that you're presenting to your visitors."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."
"Sometimes, the SSL setup can be a bit slow/inconsistent."
"Imperva now offers add-ons to add functionality, but I would like to see these included in the product, even if it would cost more."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the console by making it easier to use."
"The rules surrounding the making of web applications could be improved."
"Although we're only using it for the accelerator part, the purging of files and the way this feature functions could use improvement."
"The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information."
"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."
"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly."
"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I give the price a five out of ten."
"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."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"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."
"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."
"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."
"The tool is expensive."
"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."
"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."
"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."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."
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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
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business84
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise62
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...
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 mana...
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 provi...
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators o...
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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
NSFOCUS WAF, NSFOCUS Web Application Security
 

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.
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
2016 G20 Summit
Find out what your peers are saying about Radware, NETSCOUT, Cloudflare and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: March 2026.
886,719 professionals have used our research since 2012.