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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
143
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

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people."
"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 the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"Because our website is blazing fast it improves our conversion rates."
"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."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"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 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."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition."
"The most valuable features of the Imperva Web Application Firewall are performance and flexibility, and we can extend or customize the box itself."
"Imperva Application Security Platform has helped reduce incidents, save time, and improve my organization's security posture with specific measurable outcomes and metrics."
"Our ROI is about 45% since deployment on reduction of our cloud bill."
"Well, just by using the security rules to block all secured areas by IP minimized the chance of sensitive data leaking outside."
"Scalability is pretty easy on the base platform; you just add another, and you're ready to go."
"The solution is very affordable; it's based on the average traffic utilization, not the DDoS traffic, so if you're being DDoSed, you don't pay extra for the absorption of the DDoS traffic."
"Technical support was very helpful."
 

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."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"It looks like they don't support as many TLDs as other registrars, but since they are very new as a registrar, I expect this may improve soon."
"Flexible SSL is nothing more than an illusion of security that you're presenting to your visitors."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"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."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
"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. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The support for the on-premises version needs improvement."
"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."
"We had an issue when securing the web applications for DDoS protection."
"I'd like the option to pick your bot protection."
"Caching rules are really basic now and lots of space for improvement here."
"Users would benefit from better documentation. There is official documentation, but sometimes we need more detail."
"At that moment, I miss being able to integrate the dashboard with other BI tools we are using. We have to export and import data to be able to present it, and doing so is a lot of work."
"There is nothing specific where the application firewall is falling short."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 are using the free version."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The price is reasonable."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
Information not available
"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"The price of Imperva Web Application Firewalls is expensive compared to others."
"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."
"It is expensive."
"There are a couple of different licensing models."
"The tool is expensive."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the price."
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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 Enterprise67
 

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?
I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four...
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
There are some gaps between the implementation, expectation, and the reality. The main point is user integration with...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
F5 Distributed Cloud Services works as a Software as a Service based security, networking, and application management...
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.
892,487 professionals have used our research since 2012.