Fastly vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

Fastly and Imperva are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Fastly is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.3, while Imperva is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.8. Fastly holds a 1.6% mindshare in WAF, compared to Imperva’s 5.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Fastly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

Fastly

Read 7 Fastly reviews

898 Views
534 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Imperva Web Application Fir...

Read 52 Imperva Web Application Firewall reviews

4,495 Views
2,154 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Fastly

Imperva Web Application Fir...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and Imperva Web Application Firewall are competing in the web application security space. Imperva may have the upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set, despite Fastly's stronger support and favorable pricing.

Features: Fastly offers real-time content delivery, extensive integration capabilities, and reliable security features. Imperva Web Application Firewall provides advanced security protocols, threat intelligence, and automated policy optimization, making it a stronger choice for security-oriented needs.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could enhance its zero-trust solutions, expand its CDN configuration flexibility, and improve its security-specific features. Imperva could simplify its deployment process, reduce its initial setup cost, and improve the user experience of its interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly provides straightforward deployment with strong support channels, making integration quick. Imperva's deployment is more complex due to its extensive features but offers detailed documentation and professional services.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly is praised for cost-effective setup and transparent pricing, offering good ROI for scalable needs. Imperva, though more expensive initially, justifies its cost with enhanced security, promising strong ROI for security prioritization.

To learn more, read our detailed Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

June 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

Fastly

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

19th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (12th)

Imperva Web Application Fir...

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

7th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Fastly is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Web Application Firewall is 5.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

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Mitesh D Patel

Senior Technical Consultant- Cyber Security at Ivalue Infosolution

Effectively defends against threats like cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and others

It does bring value. For example, consider a BFSI customer. Their application is critical and represents their brand. Without a WAF, an attack could take their application down, harming their reputation. It leads to hampering the customer's workflow. With an Imperva WAF, they protect against attacks like DDoS or SQL injection, ensuring their application remains available and customers are happy. That's the main benefit for both the customer and the organization. The impact depends on the customer's use case. If their business primarily operates online, a CDN is beneficial for traffic optimization. Moreover, the integration options depend on the specific use case of our customers. Generally, integration capabilities are good with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) parts.

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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 product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications."

"It has threat intelligence and we are using Incapsula. With threat intelligence, we can separate HTTP and HTTPS traffic. We can use Incapsula to send all the threat intelligence to the WAF."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is stable."

"Very scalable and very stable firewall for web applications, with a good interface in its cloud version. Mitigation is its most valuable feature. The technical support for this product is also good."

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

"The solution is stable."

"Protection is the best solution since it has profile functionality."

"Imperva is a Gartner leader, so its scalability, performance, and features are excellent."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"Support is not that great."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"The process to upgrade from one version to another can be a lot simpler than it is currently."

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

"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the console by making it easier to use."

"It should be more user-friendly. Like other web solutions, it would be helpful to be able to easily do policy configuration and identification inside the application. Understanding the in-depth configuration of a policy is somewhat difficult for an engineer, and they can improve that."

"The user interface could be better."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the API integration. It was complex for us. Additionally, The onboarding could be better."

"One potential improvement for Imperva is enhancing its alert system."

"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."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"It is an expensive solution."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"The tool is expensive."

"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 cost of this solution depends on the platform."

"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."

"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."

"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."

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

"It is very costly, but the return on investment is very high. Its cost was around $70,000, and we got it back in just six months."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is ve...

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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 have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.

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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 of DDoS attacks that were well managed (even not seen by the customer) by Imperv...

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Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

June 2025

Download Fastly product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

June 2025

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Overview

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

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

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

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

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

June 2025

Free Report: Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

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