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Imperva DDoS vs Imperva SecureSphere Database Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Imperva DDoS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (9th)
Imperva SecureSphere Databa...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Database Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Database Security
 

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.
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.
Andrew_Kampolo - PeerSpot reviewer
The fine-grained auditing available on the platform makes life easier and helps explain anything happening in your database
Imperva's most valuable features are ease of use and log correlation. I also like the ability to trace activity from the host machine to the server access, the user details, and the exact query that they executed. If a database administrator or application process executes a query on the database, people know exactly what was executed, including all the variables. For example, it will tell you how many rows they were trying to select on which table, and you get the OS information, network details, IPs, and the user. That fine-grained auditing available on the platform makes life easier and helps explain anything happening in your database.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"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. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"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 solution is very good at intercepting traffic before it gets to our data centers."
"It is an effective threat mitigation tool."
"Real-time monitoring is also a great tool, as you may watch several parameters in real time."
"IncapRules is one of the most valuable features, as you can create your own security and access control rules on top of your security policy. Using IncapRules we were able to easily block Layer 7 DDoS attacks several times."
"There is no need to have an appliance in house for the services because it is on the cloud."
"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."
"The solution has a very good interface."
"DDoS protection and WAF are the most valuable features. It is easy to deploy a service. It is easy and quick to deploy to a new website."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the database security policy."
"The integration with CounterBreach is great."
"The technical support for Imperva is super, super, super."
"The company focuses on and has a passion for security."
"It has a lot of different components that cover the needs of our customers."
"It has a user-friendly interface. It is a stable and scalable product."
"It is very effective, and we are using four main features. The first feature is cluster management, which allows me to redirect an agent to another gateway if one goes down."
 

Cons

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"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."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"Imperva now offers add-ons to add functionality, but I would like to see these included in the product, even if it would cost more."
"Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive."
"The log analytics interface within Incapsula isn't really good. For example, if you have to get all logs from there, it's a very cumbersome process."
"It needs to be improved every time there are new attacks."
"I would like to see automated reporting to improve visibility."
"Imperva DDoS does not provide version control."
"The rules surrounding the making of web applications could be improved."
"We would like them to hire people in Sweden because it's quite hard when people are sitting in the UK or Belgium because some of the customers really want them to be local."
"The solution could improve by having more integration."
"Technical support for this solution needs improvement."
"The solution needs local support."
"Reporting could be improved."
"The GUI for this solution could use some improvement."
"Overall, it's a very good product but they could do with some modifications log-wise."
"Some cloud versions are not supported by the agent."
"It would be more efficient if we could manage the consoles of management servers from a single location"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The solution's price is high for small companies."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"It is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"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."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"This is an expensive solution and the price should be reduced."
"Imperva is too expensive for small and medium-sized enterprises. They're missing out on technology that helps them manage their data security better. Data security is essential because even the strongest network may be attacked from the inside without it."
"Licensing fees are on a yearly basis, and it is a good value for the money."
"Pricing is low and scalable to add features and volume."
"They have introduced new price models, which makes the product more affordable now."
"The price is very high but compared to the price of the overall solution, then I think it's a good deal because the solution itself is great."
"The cost of support for this solution is very expensive."
"There is an annual licensing fee for upgrading the device."
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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%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
14%
Insurance Company
6%
Retailer
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.
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...
How does IBM Guardium Data Protection compare with Imperva SecureSphere Database Security?
IBM Security Guardium Data Protection is a solution for database security from IBM that gives complete visibility, co...
What do you like most about Imperva SecureSphere Database Security?
The tool's pricing is flexible and affordable for small and medium enterprises.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Incapsula
No data available
 

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.
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.