Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Abdullah Jin

Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers bot protection and DDoS Protection and protects public-facing portals

Support is one thing I wish Imperva could improve. They follow the phone model and keep rotating you from one customer service person to another. The layer one support isn't very clear about the workings of the product. My feedback is primarily about Imperva Cloud, not on-premise. On-premise is a whole new story. Support is the issue for Imperva Cloud. It's also a bit pricey. It's a premium service and very expensive. The licensing model is not very straightforward. Every feature is priced separately, and to enjoy maximum protection, you'll have to spend a lot of money. The licensing model is a bit complex, and each feature is very pricey. For example, API security and web application protection are two separate license packages.

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Shehzad Ali

Information Security and Compliance Officer at Carnation

Offers time and cost savings with integration, but user interface needs improvement

We are using it for our internal application development. We are testing those features of application gateways. We are integrating it with our solutions, application, Azure Application Gateway Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well. It provides a range of services, so it…

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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

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"The UI is good."

"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

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

"The technical support is good."

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

More Cloudflare pros

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

"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."

"Very intuitive and granular configuration - It does not require much time, or advanced knowledge, for configuration and maintenance."

"The tool's profiling feature maps all the web application directories and related components on the profile directory. It has improved the security of my client's website applications."

"The solution can be configured in just a couple of minutes."

"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."

"The solution is stable."

"The solution has been quite stable. I have not seen any bugs at all."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

"We chose this solution in the first place because it has access to Layer 7. I can control the requests and the content, which I can access on my network if I want to even if it's forbidden access to other external resources. If I want to monitor, for example, traffic, and apply this rule on Layer 7, I can do so. This was our main goal when implementing this application. We wanted to take advantage of the Gateway capabilities."

"The health probe is pretty good for your backend health. It tells you whether it's communicating and talking to the endpoint correctly. It is quite useful."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the web application firewall (WAF)."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"The solution provides great automation and it is easy to upgrade service."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway gives us a lot of benefits, including domain mapping."

"Azure Application Gateway's most valuable feature is ease of use. The configuration is straightforward. It isn't difficult to adjust the size of your instances in the settings. You can do that with a few clicks, and the configuration file is the same way. You can also set rules and policies with minimal time and effort."

"The solution's integration is very good."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pros

Cons

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"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."

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

"Integration involving API with other products 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."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

More Cloudflare cons

"If they can bring in generative AI features, that would be useful."

"I would like to improve the tool's turnaround time in terms of support."

"It is complicated to integrate the solution's on-cloud version with other platforms."

"They can provide an option to create reports, automatically import the entire report, and create rules again. In a real-life crisis, it would be helpful to be able to import a report and generate security rules from that report. I should be able to create a simple query and import the reports automatically. It can maybe also tell us the format of the report."

"The process to upgrade from one version to another can be a lot simpler than it is currently."

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

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a good system, but we found that the visibility of the diverse-path server, e.g. where the traffic is coming from, the different IPs, etc., needs improvement."

"The user interface could be better."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

"The working speed of the solution needs improvement."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is harder to manage than Imperva. It is not intuitive and stable compared to other products."

"We faced some downtime while validating CNAME."

"Implementing and standardizing the solution across the IT landscape in a heterogeneous environment is painful."

"The solution has many limitations. You cannot upgrade the VPN to the application gateway. So I started with version one, which has limited capabilities, and they provided version two. And unfortunately, I cannot upgrade from v one to v two like other services. So I have to decommission the version one and create a new one with version two. Also the version one was complex with the certificates uploading the SQL certificates."

"Customer service can be improved. There is room for improvement, specifically in paid support, by providing more direct contact."

"One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS."

"It could be more stable, and support could be better. It would also be better if they offered more features. For example, it lacks security features. Before we used another English solution, and we realized that some of the rules were not set up correctly and passed through the Application Gateway's English controllers. But the problem, in this case, is if you send ten rules, for example, six rules hit some issues. IP address blocking could be better. The rules, for example, don't work properly. If you have one issue, one rule or another rule will not work. This sounds like total madness to me."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"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 price of the solution is expensive."

"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."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

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

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."

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

"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."

"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."

"It is a very affordable solution."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution can be reduced a bit."

"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has less price than other application gateway solutions."

"The solution's pricing is not complex. It is not expensive from our point of view."

"The solution is fairly priced."

"We use the tool's basic subscription. Its licensing costs are monthly."

"The pricing is based on how much you use the solution."

"It is not expensive."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

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?

My recommendation is Imperva.

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 ...

What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?

We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...

How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 11% of the time

HAProxy vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 9% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Imperva Web Application Firewall

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Download Microsoft Azure Application Gateway product report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Imperva Web Application Firewall is a versatile solution that protects web applications and databases from various attacks, including DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks. It offers data security, availability, and access control and can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud.

The solution has good security against web attacks and offers advanced bot protection, API security, and mitigation features. Imperva WAF is easy to configure and deploy; it has good customer service and an excellent user interface.

Imperva

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens

Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway