Imperva Web Application Firewall vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

Imperva and Fastly are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Imperva is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.9, while Fastly is ranked #27 with an average rating of 7.7. Additionally, 97% of Imperva users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 50% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Imperva Web Application Firewall and Fastly Next-Gen WAF compete in the web application security market. While Imperva offers pricing and support advantages, Fastly delivers robust features and integration capabilities, making it a superior choice.

Features: Imperva includes advanced bot protection, customizable rule sets, and comprehensive security measures. Fastly provides real-time threat intelligence, seamless integration with DevOps workflows, and dynamic scalability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Imperva has a straightforward deployment model with extensive customer support. Fastly delivers rapid deployment and minimal infrastructure adjustments due to its cloud-native architecture, with support characterized by proactive issue resolution.

Pricing and ROI: Imperva's initial setup cost is budget-friendly with compelling ROI. Fastly has a higher upfront cost but offers significant ROI with integration capabilities and enhanced protection, reducing potential downtime and breaches.

To learn more, read our detailed Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

April 2025

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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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Archana Heeralal

Security Engineer at Amazon

A good solution to implement web application firewall for applications

There are some lags in Signal Sciences for the web application firewalls. Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic. There is a little bit of complexity with custom rules that should be removed. Signal Sciences should add a feature called rate limiting with multiple options, wherein I can create a rate limiting based on the cookie request or the IP.

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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

"It's very user-friendly."

"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."

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

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

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"The technical support is good."

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

"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."

"The solution is stable."

"It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications."

"The solution is very scalable. It is one of the most important features. You can also expand resources and features as well."

"Imperva WAF's strongest features are the detection of web application threats and vulnerabilities in the source code."

"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."

"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."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."

"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."

Cons

"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."

"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."

"Technical support is lacking."

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

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

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

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

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

More Cloudflare cons

"They recently separated the WAF and the DAM management gateways in order for each of these to be managed from different areas, so I believe it now requires additional investments for what was previously a single complete solution."

"The reporting is missing some features, such as: only two export formats, and the time period does not include the last day, week, year."

"I would like the solution to improve its support response time."

"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."

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

"The signature updates could be faster. Sometimes we have to upload signatures to the Imperva portal for checking and analysis before we can use 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 Imperva Web Application Firewall automations are good, but there is still room for improvement with them."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."

"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."

"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."

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 pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

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

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

"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."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."

"The solution's pricing is an issue."

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

"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."

"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."

"It is a very affordable solution."

"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."

"The tool is expensive."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The product has an affordable cost."

"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."

"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."

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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851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

My recommendation is Imperva.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Signal Sciences?

The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?

The pricing is 50% less than Akamai.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?

Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 15% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

NetScaler vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

AWS WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 19% of the time

Azure Front Door vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 14% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 12% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 10% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 6% of the time

More The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

May 2025

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2025

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) report

Download The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP

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

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) provides web application and API protection, RASP, rate limiting, bot protection and DDoS purpose built to eliminate the challenges of legacy WAF.

Fastly

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

Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

April 2025

Free Report: Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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