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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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
Sponsored
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (3rd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (18th)
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in CDN
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (16th), API Security (6th)
Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in CDN
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
144
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Bot Management (1st), API Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.4%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 8.0%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare16.4%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.0%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services2.4%
Other73.2%
CDN
 

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.
Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management
F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"If you don't want to spend too much time hosting your own DNS server or managing the domain, Cloudflare is a great way to rapidly get websites and services online."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"The aggressive caching and DDOS mitigation are the most valuable features offered by Cloudflare."
"Because our website is blazing fast it improves our conversion rates."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."
"Imperva DDoS helps us automate production. The client had specific requirements for a cloud project in the financial sector."
"The solution can scale."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a highly stable solution and is very mature."
"Integration with IBM AS/400 and Db2 is okay."
"The solution can be configured in just a couple of minutes."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a highly stable solution and is very mature."
"Deployment is simple and very fast."
"The solution has been quite stable. I have not seen any bugs at all."
 

Cons

"For the services I am using, it is a bit expensive."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"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."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"More insight into analytics and threats would be a good place to start improving Cloudflare."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
"The product's customization capabilities are a bit problematic, requiring support cases for backend modifications."
"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."
"Imperva always needs to adjust to new versions of cyber attacks, it needs to be faster, improve the resiliency of the software of the solution."
"There could be some limitations 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."
"The price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."
"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."
"The solution should integrate with something that looks at continuous security management."
"There’s nothing that’s missing in terms of features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"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."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"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 pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
Information not available
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the price."
"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."
"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."
"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business88
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise69
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I need to think about this for the future. F5 Distributed Cloud Services needs to create links with Amazon and Google...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I collect reviews for F5 Distributed Cloud Services and F5 Silverline Managed Services. I work with F5 Distributed Cl...
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...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API 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.
Information Not Available
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Imperva Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.