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Imperva Web Application Firewall vs NGINX App Protect comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 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 Web Application Fir...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (7th)
NGINX App Protect
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (16th), Container Security (23rd), API Security (3rd)
 

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.
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.
Saurav Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers protection to users from external threats
NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"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."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"It works right out of the box once you integrate the application."
"Data masking is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"Imperva monitors all traffic, even customer access, to the web application. Then, Imperva uses features like signatures to identify attacks like cross-site scripting or SQL injection."
"The dynamic profiling of websites is the solution's most valuable feature. The security is also good."
"One good thing about Imperva Web Application Firewall is it can be on the cloud and also it can be on-premise."
"There is a quick switch between any of the the nodes if something goes wrong, where there's a there's an attack against a specific area. The security setup is reasonably easy. It's not a problem to do setups and rules and integrations. And, yeah, just the the back end team is also very willing to insist if there's questions that that we cannot answer or with these questions that we do have"
"It is easy to use and has good security."
"The features I have found most valuable with Imperva Web Application Firewall are account takeover protection, advanced bot protection, and API security."
"Overall, I rate NGINX App Protect between eight and nine."
"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working."
"NGINX App Protect is stable."
"The most valuable feature is that I can establish different services from the firewall."
"It is a stable solution."
"I tested specific features and evaluated the solution against the Web Application Firewall. I conducted research to test different detection percentages. I did not use it directly for protection but for evaluation purposes."
"The stability of the product is very impressive since it handles 60,000 to 70,000 requests or transactions per second."
"It's very easy to deploy."
 

Cons

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"The process to upgrade from one version to another can be a lot simpler than it is currently."
"It is complicated to integrate the solution's on-cloud version with other platforms."
"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."
"It's a complicated tool to keep."
"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."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by adding more features to the dashboard. increasing the visibility of the real-time events, besides configuring the administration itself."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is very expensive."
"The reporting is missing some features, such as: only two export formats, and the time period does not include the last day, week, year."
"It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requirements and specifications to deploy the service, to avoid disruptions after implementation."
"The setup of NGINX App Protect is complex. The full process took one week to complete. Additionally, we had to change the network infrastructure platform which took one month."
"The integration of NGINX App Protect could improve."
"They could provide a better user interface."
"Its technical support could be better."
"The solution needs to be improved in the e-commerce portal."
"NGINX App Protect would be improved with integration with Shape and F5 WAF, which would make it easy for users to manage all their web application security with a single solution."
"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"We are using the free version."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"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."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."
"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."
"There are some licenses that you have to buy to use some features. Its price could be better. Price is always important because, at the end of the day, customers have a budget. If you can meet the budget, you can sell, and if you don't, you cannot sell."
"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."
"The price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."
"The price of Imperva Web Application Firewalls is expensive compared to others."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall's pricing is expensive."
"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."
"The product's price is high."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."
"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."
"NGINX App Protect is expensive."
"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."
"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
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.
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?
I don't know the pricing yet because in my other project, I was not part of the buying side and I was just starting t...
What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?
It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requir...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall
 

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.
BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.