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Imperva Application Security Platform vs NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 21, 2025

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

Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
133
Ranking in other categories
CDN (2nd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Bot Management (1st), API Security (2nd)
NSFOCUS Web Application Fir...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
43rd
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 7.8%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Imperva Application Security Platform7.8%
NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall0.5%
Other91.7%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1247523 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Solution ensures website availability and proactive threat mitigation
Over the seven years, the most valuable features of Imperva DDoS that I have found are related to DDoS attacks, which are a group of attacks, and not all of them can be resolved on the endpoint level before the website. Using the web firewall before the website is a common use case to protect against malicious requests to the website. I have utilized Imperva's Intelligent Traffic Filtering feature. This feature helps me understand how the attack is progressing and what is happening inside the requests to our website. It allows me to granularly grant or deny access to certain parts of our website. This helps when we know our customers and the types of requests that can be sent from them, enabling us to block some malicious requests. Imperva DDoS has User Behavior Analytics and Threat Intelligence on its board, and this helps us to be protected proactively. Imperva DDoS connects to its database of threats, storing whole information about attacks all over the world in one simple engine. Everyone can use this feature, which can connect to this engine and get information about what is going on at the world level. That is the way to be protected at the company's level. The integration capabilities of Imperva DDoS are very easy and simple. We can run it in 2 hours.
it_user933945 - PeerSpot reviewer
Desktop Engineer at eros international media ltd
Offers Application Protection Against Web Attacks
There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Learning mode and custom policies are helpful features."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a highly stable solution and is very mature."
"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."
"There are many features. There is ease of deployment. You can deploy the Imperva Web Application Firewall in two to three minutes. After that, you have to set the policies. For setting policies, you have toggle buttons. You can turn something on or off."
"There are quite a few useful Imperva Incapsula features. For example, one of them is the reports. The graphics are very good and it's easy to configure. The whole process is very fast and reliable too. They have good tech support as well."
"The most valuable feature of Imperva DDoS is to make our website available for our customers' requests 24 hours a day."
"On the site security, I can see which countries have incidents, whether it was a robot attack, a real human user, or non-human user."
"It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications."
"Since we are using this tool for protection purposes we really appreciate the hybrid security abilities; the main idea here is that we powerful protection our application needs."
 

Cons

"The rules surrounding the making of web applications could be improved."
"We faced issues regarding compliance with client procedures. The client had strict compliance rules, and Imperva needed to be on a VM, while the client required containerization, causing a conflict. They went with Imperva for the on-premise version but shelved the cloud project due to too many blockers."
"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 initial setup could be simplified. Every time you have to install the solution you have to get in touch with support or somebody that can to do that for you."
"They recently separated the WAF and the DAM management gateways in order for each of these to be managed from different areas, so I believe it now requires additional investments for what was previously a single complete solution."
"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."
"Some of the features should be included in the next release is a file integrating monitoring tool. This feature should be improved."
"I am not sure if this application has a policy where you can create your custom policy and run it as our firewall. We should have some ability to also create some custom policy, then run it as a firewall."
"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is an issue."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the price."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
Information not available
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Expert with 51-200 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business83
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise61
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 management.
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, setup costs, and licensing of Imperva DDoS are reasonable for the amount of technical capabilities provided. I would rate the pricing of Imperva DDoS as five, where one is very cheap a...
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Also Known As

Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
NSFOCUS WAF, NSFOCUS Web Application Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
2016 G20 Summit
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: February 2026.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.