F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

F5 and Imperva are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6, while Imperva is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.9. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Imperva Web Application Firewall and F5 Advanced WAF compete in the web application security category. Based on various comparisons, Imperva stands out in ease of deployment, while F5 is noted for its comprehensive security features.

Features: Imperva offers dynamic profiling, threat intelligence integration, and versatile deployment across cloud and on-premises environments. It excels in ease of configuration and third-party tool integration. F5 Advanced WAF provides advanced bot protection, DDOS mitigation, and a wide array of security capabilities. Its granular policy control and behavior analysis are valuable to enterprises seeking in-depth security.

Room for Improvement: Imperva requires improvements in its GUI and policy management as some users find it complex. Enhanced visibility features, support for URL filtering, and quicker support response times are suggested. F5 Advanced WAF users request better reporting capabilities, a more user-friendly interface, and improved tool integration. Licensing and configuration ease are other areas needing enhancement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Imperva offers flexible deployment options, favorable for both on-premises and cloud setups. However, support could be more region-focused. F5 Advanced WAF excels in on-premises deployment but can improve cloud compatibility and support consistency. Its setup is perceived as complex, demanding advanced technical knowledge, unlike the more straightforward Imperva.

Pricing and ROI: Imperva's pricing is considered high but justified by its proactive approach and significant ROI, especially in critical sectors like banking. F5 Advanced WAF, although costly, offers competitive pricing in subscription models and robust protection for high-stakes environments. Both require considerable investment, with Imperva being slightly more expensive but offering comprehensive security features.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

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

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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Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable

Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.

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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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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 is its usability."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."

"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."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

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

"The UI is good."

More Cloudflare pros

"One of the most valuable features is the Local Traffic Manager."

"Good dashboard and reporting."

"F5 Advanced WAF secures our connectivity and combines both the main functions of WAF (balancing and web application security)."

"Provides good protection from attacks."

"The whole mechanism of F5 Advanced WAF is effective."

"The solution's most valuable features include application DDoS protection, bot blocking, and HTTP header verifications."

"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."

"In terms of F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features, I would definitely say its stability. F5 is one the most stable products. Either as the load balancer or the web application firewall, it is very stable."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

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

"Imperva has a complete picture of how the applications are utilizing it. It is handy. DDoS is good. It has an internally managed database. It is very easy to integrate. We have integrated it with SIEM services."

"The dynamic profiling of websites is the solution's most valuable feature. The security is also good."

"It is easy to use and has good security."

"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."

"One good thing about Imperva Web Application Firewall is it can be on the cloud and also it can be on-premise."

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

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is stable."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

"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."

"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."

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

More Cloudflare cons

"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."

"The product could be more user-friendly, particularly the user interface for administrators."

"We usually use a third-party tool for logging and reporting. It would be nice if we could do that right on this solution. They have one, but it's not very stable. Logging and reporting effectively would be a big enhancement."

"I would like to see additional controls."

"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."

"I would not expect traffic details to pass through the web application firewall across the length of the whole application. I think that there is a web application where it can let the application function without traffic going in into the WAF."

"I would like for there to be a cloud-based solution, this would also help to improve scalability."

"You have to buy another module with an extra license, to have the authentication feature."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"The reporting is missing some features, such as: only two export formats, and the time period does not include the last day, week, year."

"The user interface could be better."

"It would be useful if the solution used more intelligence in attack protection. For example, firewalls are to be dependent on the configuration, but if they could have some data science around it the solution would be even better. The profiling of the traffic, and making decisions surrounding that should be intelligence-based, instead of being based on the configuration of the firewall itself."

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

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

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

"The tool needs to improve CPU and storage memory."

"I loved the approach of the cloud. The cloud has a lot of new features, like advanced web protection and DDoS protection. If those could also be on-boarded onto the on-prem versions, that would be ideal. They need to pay attention to both deployment options and not just favor one."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

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

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

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

"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 solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

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

"We don't have any issues with the price."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price."

"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."

"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."

"I am not sure about pricing but licenses are available on Google."

"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."

"The price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve it is expensive."

"There are different licenses available to use F5 Advanced WAF, such as BT, ASM, and LPM."

"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."

"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 price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."

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

"Imperva Web Application Firewall's pricing is expensive."

"It is a very affordable solution."

"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."

"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

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 F5 Advanced WAF?

It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the r...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

The price is affordable and satisfactory.

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

I do not have anything in mind right now that needs improvement. Generally, it works well. If we need any specific fe...

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

My recommendation is Imperva.

See all answers

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 DDoS Protection Service 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

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

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 22% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Front Door vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 4% of the time

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 4% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 16% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

NetScaler vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

May 2025

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

May 2025

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

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

F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.

F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.

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.

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.

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

April 2025

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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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.