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Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Imperva DDoS comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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 Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Fortinet FortiDDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Imperva DDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.4%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiDDoS is 3.0%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 6.7%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Yazan Omar - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-use tool with great GUI
The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.
Syed Ubaid Ali Jafri - PeerSpot reviewer
I like the content monitoring feature which I haven't seen in other WAF solutions.
They could improve by minimizing false positive results. Although this occurs less with Imperva, we would like to see some further improvements. We have been using this product for last 1 years, it's result is very impressive. But due to the excessive load on the Web site where thousands of requests‎ are generated from legitimate users, however the request in which any sequential or specialised characters are requested would be directly blocked by impreva . Currently imperva blocks the special character request generated from the user, as I conduct a test where I am parsing the encoded html values of the same special characters to the input field, imperva bypasses these encoded values for example : ' i.e. %27 or / i.e %2F, the WAF bypasses these encoded characters. I hope that this device should have a capability to detect the pattern which is associated with Xss or Xsrf, rather then by not blocking the request which contains any special characters.

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 features of the solution are performance and security."
"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"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 that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"The solution already has security profiles and it can protect from DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks."
"Packet inspection has been effective for mitigating DDoS attacks."
"It allows me to see all the traffic on my network."
"The solution is very user-friendly and very easy to use."
"I find the interface easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is the cloud DDoS scrubbing capability."
"This solution can protect Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 attacks of applications for us."
"Among its key features: Detects and mitigates DDoS attacks at L3 to L7; negligible to zero false-positives; Generates and sends reports without the need for an expensive third-party solution."
"I like the user-friendly interface."
"The setup of Imperva DDoS was easy."
"On the activity log, I can see the exact details, the visit, and the threat."
"Scalability is pretty easy on the base platform. You just add another, and you're ready to go."
"It fits our requirements, as well as our budget."
"The solution has a very good interface."
"The dashboard is good and user-friendly."
"The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition."
 

Cons

"Technical support is lacking."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"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."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"The only thing they need to do is to automate it. Today, you must create tools that do not require the use of an expert or anyone with special skills."
"I find that there have been issues in the past year with the solution hanging. It freezes often."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"The web interface could be much better."
"The challenge lies within the customer environment, particularly in Brazil, where companies have stringent security requirements for implementing solutions."
"All the thresholds that need to be configured should be included in the default so that user will not forget or misconfigure."
"Alerts and reporting features must be improved."
"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."
"It needs to be improved every time there are new attacks."
"The weakest point of Imperva is their first level of support, which should be improved. They should also improve the access and security logs viewing directly on the portal. I would like to see better access and security logs through the portal and not only through a SIM solution. Currently, if you want to explore your access and security logs from Imperva, you need a SIM tool or a SIM infrastructure on your side to do it. You can't do it manually or directly through the portal, which is a big problem for us. I had a call yesterday with Imperva for the roadmap, and I just told them this. They agreed that this is an improvement point from their side."
"The solution should integrate with something that looks at continuous security management."
"It would be beneficial to include vulnerability management in the solution, similar to what they have for their on-premise solution."
"The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information."
"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."
"The solution needs to improve Integration with third parties for their on-prem deployment models. The integration is not that good yet."
"Its price could be improved. It is quite expensive. It will be good if we could export the configuration. Currently, to control the configuration, we need to go to each website, which is not very convenient."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"We are using the free version."
"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."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"It's quite pricey."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"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."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"It is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category."
"It is expensive."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

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...
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 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.
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would...
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?
The product's initial setup phase was really easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?
The pricing is correct and includes the equipment. I find the price to be very reasonable.
What do you like most about Imperva Incapsula?
We use Imperva DDoS to stop DDoS attacks and reduce the amount of unwanted queries against web services or web scraping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Imperva DDoS?
The pricing is rated a ten on a scale where ten is very expensive. The solution is only cloud-based and does not prov...
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive. Additionally, support response times for emails can sometimes be d...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos
Imperva Incapsula
 

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.
Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiDDoS vs. Imperva DDoS and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.