Imperva Application Security Platform vs Prolexic comparison

Imperva Application Security Platform vs. Prolexic

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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

Cloudflare

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.2%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 8.5%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 2.9%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare	16.2%
Imperva Application Security Platform	8.5%
Prolexic	2.9%
Other	72.4%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

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reviewer1247523

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.

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Gavin Pinho

Privacy & Risk Management Vice President, Information Security at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Has faced challenges with bot detection while benefiting from strong threat monitoring and compliance support

Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance. We utilize the real-time monitoring of the solution. Real-time monitoring helps us identify network vulnerabilities by allowing us to see a spike in traffic and understand the traffic levels compared to this time last month or last week. If we notice a sudden increase, we investigate further to determine if it indicates a DDoS attack or a card testing situation. In terms of threat detection capabilities, they are very good because Akamai has a SOC service that we have tapped into for active threat detection and threat hunting, and they monitor everything carefully 24/7. Scrubbing is done by Akamai as a backend service, and we utilize their SOC, which is a service that you pay additional fees for, allowing us to have our queries prioritized. Prolexic features help maintain business continuity during high-volume attacks by having built-in threat detection capabilities in its bot detection and other functionalities, as attacks usually occur through intelligent bots trying to infiltrate the system.

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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 API gives us the ability to remote control our DNS settings."

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"It's very user-friendly."

"For businesses that don't have a dedicated security team, I think it's a better product; it's more intuitive for people like us."

"CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security."

"Cloudflare makes it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple users and multiple clients, and basically go in and access their account, make the changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."

More Cloudflare pros

"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."

"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."

"Setup was straightforward, very simple. I only entered the domain and Incapsula returned the DNS data that I needed to change for the protection to be configured."

"The most valuable aspect of it is that it blocks all types of attacks."

"Imperva Cloud WAF would be the most powerful option."

"The features that are most valuable are the protection against denial-of-service attacks and all kinds of other internet attacks."

"The main benefit is the use case my clients find valuable, because for the product and security there is good API inspection, and if any abnormal API appears or there are any similarities due to changes, the API security features will catch that so allowed APIs will get access while others will be blocked."

"I have had a positive experience with Imperva Web Application Firewall's tech support so far. They are knowledgeable and respond on time."

More Imperva Application Security Platform pros

"Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance."

"Prolexic technical support is second to none."

"The support from Akamai is great, and they provide excellent information and mitigation services."

"They've scrubbed DDoS traffic that was blasting us offline, thus allowing legitimate traffic through and letting our service return online."

"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."

Cons

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"I would like to not need a separate server for non-www redirection under the CNAME setup option."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"Flexible SSL is nothing more than an illusion of security that you're presenting to your visitors."

"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."

More Cloudflare cons

"Incapsula has a built-in monitoring module, but it is a paid feature; I would expect that for the price we pay for the basic service, we would be able to integrate a monitoring solution, even a simple one."

"I think that better bot protection is needed in this solution."

"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."

"They can provide an option to create a report, automatically import the entire report, and create rules again."

"I would rate the solution as an 8 out of 10, simply because of the difficulty of operation management. It's a complicated tool to keep."

"The API is lackluster but especially for customers."

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

"Pricing is a challenge for most of our customers."

More Imperva Application Security Platform cons

"It's expensive, though."

"The reports provided don’t give detailed information about DDoS mitigations, bandwidth utilization, etc."

"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."

"In bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a continuously evolving challenge."

"The web portal for checking status and traffic needs improvements."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"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."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is expensive."

"The price of Imperva Web Application Firewalls is expensive compared to others."

"The solution's price is high for small companies."

"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."

"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."

"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."

"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."

"Pricing could be more competitive."

More Imperva Application Security Platform pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour."

See which vendors are best for you

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885,789 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

29%

Comms Service Provider

16%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	84
Midsize Enterprise	25
Large Enterprise	62

No data available

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 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 mana...

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...

What needs improvement with Akamai Prolexic Routed?

For the DDoS protection, I don't see any areas for improvement because they are pretty solid there, though in bot man...

What is your primary use case for Akamai Prolexic Routed?

The main use case for DDoS protection is to mitigate risks, and there are multiple ways Akamai provides DDoS protecti...

What advice do you have for others considering Akamai Prolexic Routed?

We have a couple of products, including DDoS protection, WAF, and Bot Manager. There are two ways Akamai does DDoS pr...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 42% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Compared 2% of the time

Fastly vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Akamai vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 5% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 3% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 3% of the time

Fastly vs Imperva Application Security Platform

Compared 2% of the time

More Imperva Application Security Platform Competitors

Akamai App and API Protector vs Prolexic

Compared 17% of the time

Lumen DDoS Mitigation vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

Radware DDoS vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Prolexic

Compared 8% of the time

Oracle Dyn Web Application Security vs Prolexic

Compared 3% of the time

More Prolexic Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Imperva Application Security Platform

Download Imperva Application Security Platform product report

Imperva Application Security Platform report

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Download Prolexic product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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

Akamai Prolexic Routed

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

Imperva Application Security Platform delivers comprehensive and continuous web threat protection. Renowned for its ease of use, it shields web applications and databases from various cyber threats while integrating seamlessly with cloud and on-premises environments.

Imperva Application Security Platform protects web environments by offering advanced security measures against threats like DDoS attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting. As a robust web application firewall, it provides extensive monitoring and bot management capabilities. The platform integrates content delivery networks for enhanced performance and scalability, while real-time traffic analysis ensures consistent protection. Despite its strengths, improvements can be made in policy management and customization options. Users seek better integration with third-party tools and more competitive pricing models. The inclusion of AI for enhanced analytics is also anticipated.

What are the key features of Imperva Application Security Platform?

Correlated Attack Validation: Enhances threat assessment by linking related security events.
Threat Radar: Offers visibility into potential and ongoing threats.
Virtual Patching: Provides protection against vulnerabilities without immediate code changes.
IncapRules: Allows creation of custom security policies.
DDoS Protection: Defends against large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks.
CDN Integration: Improves content delivery speed and reliability.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

User-Friendly Administration: Simplifies setup and ongoing management tasks.
Seamless Integration: Ensures smooth operation with existing infrastructure.
Comprehensive Threat Protection: Shields digital assets from a wide range of threats.
Hands-On Support: Provides timely and effective customer service assistance.

Imperva Application Security Platform is implemented in industries needing strong database and application protection. Companies use it to enforce geolocation restrictions and manage bots, benefiting sectors like finance and e-commerce where data security and threat monitoring are critical. Its ability to protect and ensure data accessibility makes it integral to business operations prioritizing cyber resilience.

Imperva

Akamai Prolexic is a cloud-based DDoS protection solution that defends your data center and hybrid infrastructure to ensure availability and uptime. It provides comprehensive port and protocol protection against the broadest range of DDoS attacks, including high-bandwidth sustained attacks and complex multi-vector attacks. Prolexic is available as an always-on or on-demand service, contains a Network Cloud Firewall, and offers flexible integration models based on your desired security posture across hybrid origins. Prolexic is backed by a proven platform with more than 20 Tbps of dedicated DDoS defense capacity and our 24/7/365 global SOCC for a fully managed solution.

Prolexic stops DDoS attacks closer to the source to maximize performance for users and to maintain network resiliency through cloud distribution. Instead of originating advertisements for your prefixes from your cloud/data centers, you’ll make either a border gateway protocol route advertisement change or DNS redirection (A record or CNAME record) to originate from one of many Akamai scrubbing centers globally. Your intended traffic is then routed to the user via Anycast through the closest scrubbing center. Prolexic will inspect the traffic to determine if it is good or bad, and apply proactive and/or custom mitigation controls designed to stop attacks instantly if needed. This ensures fast and accurate DDoS protection. Clean traffic is then returned to the customer origin via GRE tunnels, Layer 2 VLAN connections, and/or VIP-to-origin back-end mapping with little perceived latency. Prolexic also features a Network Cloud Firewall that allows IT teams to auto generate or manually manage access control lists.

Akamai

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.

Fidor Bank

Imperva Application Security Platform vs. Prolexic