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Akamai API Security vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 21, 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

Akamai API Security
Ranking in API Security
1st
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in API Security
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
133
Ranking in other categories
CDN (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Bot Management (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the API Security category, the mindshare of Akamai API Security is 11.4%, down from 22.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 7.9%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Security Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Akamai API Security11.4%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.9%
Other80.7%
API Security
 

Featured Reviews

WB
Arquiteto at C.Vale - Cooperativa Agroindustrial
Uses bot detection and browser inspection features to fine-tune access policies effectively
I enabled the anomaly detection to understand the solution better. I configured the policies and created exclusions for some bots. For example, when I read and inspected the user agent data, I found that the Axion bot request was blocked by the browser inspector. In this case, I created an exclusion for the user agent Axion. I enabled the anomaly detection to study and understand the solution.
reviewer1247523 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The API part is effective."
"Akamai API Security has made a positive difference for our organization by improving our security posture and saving our team time, as we can actually prioritize tasks unless there are some false positives, but it is definitely saving a lot of time."
"API throttling is the most valuable feature of Akamai API Security."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its integration with API gateways, WAP and with part of their SDLC."
"The support from Akamai API Security is good, the employment and support are of excellent quality."
"Real-time monitoring is also a great tool, as you may watch several parameters in real time."
"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 most valuable features of the Imperva Web Application Firewall are performance and flexibility. We can extend or customize the box itself."
"The solution is scalable."
"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."
"​Technical support provides good, quick responses."
"Simplifies putting everything in code."
"Provides Anti-DDoS protection, as well as other protections like SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and antiscanner. These types of protection are valuable to the business due to the daily attacks on our portals, and that often cannot be seen without a tool like this."
 

Cons

"I think it would be good if they can integrate more with API gateways as this is currently limited."
"More features would be beneficial."
"The challenge I found was with contextualization and how analytics are generated."
"It would be beneficial to use machine learning and API throttling together to identify how the APIs are called and whether it's coming from the right person or the wrong person."
"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."
"I am looking for more data enrichment. We should have the ability to add our own custom data to the system, to the live traffic."
"It's a complicated tool to keep."
"I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators of compromise."
"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."
"Certificate management could be improved."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a limit to the number of APIs we can use inside a bundle, and we have to pay extra if we exceed that limit."
"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"The tool is expensive."
"The price of Imperva Web Application Firewalls is expensive compared to others."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which API Security solutions are best for your needs.
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Expert with 51-200 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business83
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise61
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai API Security?
It is not expensive. It is practical to use and represents an excellent solution.
What is your primary use case for Akamai API Security?
I use Akamai API Security. I downloaded a report comparing WAF Akamai and WAF Azure to understand the real differences. I studied the solution to comprehend how it detects bots. For example, with A...
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 management.
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 provided. I would rate the pricing of Imperva DDoS as five, where one is very cheap a...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai API Security vs. Imperva Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.