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Imperva DDoS vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
Imperva DDoS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
CDN (5th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (5th)
Imperva Web Application Fir...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
DerrickAkankwasa - PeerSpot reviewer
Provide DDoS protection and better security at effective rate
It is expanding its number of data centers for scrubbing traffic. Currently, there is only one POP for cleaning in South Africa. They might add another POP in North Africa, possibly in Nigeria or Egypt. Latency concerns customers, especially in regions like East and West Africa, where traffic has to travel to South Africa before returning. Increasing the number of POPs across the continent would help address these latency issues and improve overall service. While the platform is already quite strong, there’s always room for improvement, especially in keeping up with emerging trends and new types of attacks. Enhancing security capabilities could be beneficial. Integrating more advanced AI features could significantly improve its effectiveness and help customers leverage these tools more effectively. It would be great to see more focus on AI integration to handle and analyze data more efficiently.
Mitesh D Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"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."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The bot management features are very effective, as they help filter unwanted traffic using keywords."
"I like the user-friendly interface."
"It blocks all types of attacks."
"The technical support is excellent."
"Real-time monitoring is also a great tool, as you may watch several parameters in real time."
"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."
"On the real time, you can see live traffic, which is flowing into our website."
"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."
"Learning mode and custom policies are helpful features."
"Imperva is a Gartner leader, so its scalability, performance, and features are excellent."
"I have had a positive experience with Imperva Web Application Firewall's tech support so far. They are knowledgeable and respond on time."
"The configurability of the tools and the ease of operation to be the most valuable feature of Imperva."
"There are some features that are configured by default, so even without doing much, it can still provide a level of protection."
"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."
"Its inline transferring mode is the most valuable because it is 100% transparent. When you change the IP, there is no change on the network side. If you can't and want to try to reach an IP, you can reach the server IP. There are many other advanced security features in it. The smallest appliances of Imperva can handle the highest traffic at a customer site. For example, a smaller appliance from Imperva can provide you the same security as an F5 product."
"The solution is cloud-based and offers us good uptime. It has combined web and API security. Therefore, with one license, you access both application security and also API security."
 

Cons

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"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."
"The pricing could be improved."
"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."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators of compromise."
"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."
"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."
"The cost could be lower; our end clients need to have a high budget to purchase this solution."
"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."
"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."
"It would be better if we were able to manage and apply changes to multiple websites/web applications, and search WAF logs for multiple websites, via the Incapsula dashboard."
"We had an issue when securing the web applications for DDoS protection."
"The tool needs to improve CPU and storage memory."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by providing better features, such as improved prevention of zero-day attacks. Additionally, it should include a VR meta-analysis."
"The reporting is missing some features, such as: only two export formats, and the time period does not include the last day, week, year."
"If they can bring in generative AI features, that would be useful."
"The solution works for particular zones but isn't always the best solution for all zones."
"The Imperva Web Application Firewall automations are good, but there is still room for improvement with them."
"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."
"The product's customization capabilities are a bit problematic, requiring support cases for backend modifications."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"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."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall's pricing is expensive."
"The price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."
"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."
"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."
"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
"The tool is expensive."
"It is a very affordable solution."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
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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
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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, 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...
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 hav...
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 ...
 

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 Imperva DDoS vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.