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Akamai Bot Manager vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 17, 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 Bot Manager
Ranking in Bot Management
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in Bot Management
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), API Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Bot Management category, the mindshare of Akamai Bot Manager is 21.5%, up from 21.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 11.9%, down from 14.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Bot Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Imperva Application Security Platform11.9%
Akamai Bot Manager21.5%
Other66.6%
Bot Management
 

Featured Reviews

Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a good user experience and has a straightforward initial setup phase
The features of the tool are associated with the licensing part, so my company uses Akamai Bot Manager for account takeovers. The aforementioned area consists of functionality related to the product, which is available straight out of the box. The product is very straightforward. One of the features of the product is associated with the fact that it allows us to automate the blocking of countries, like Russia, that have some serious criminal records or where the crimes are high, so my company uses IP geo protection as a function. VPNs from areas that are used by some bots to potentially launch attacks are blocked by automating certain processes through Akamai. Akamai has a database of blacklisted IPs, URLs, and users.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Akamai Bot Manager is very easy to scale. Adding new domains or subdomains is a super easy process."
"Akamai Bot Manager has two valuable features: BMS (Bot Manager Standard) and BMP (Bot Manager Premier)."
"The best feature is the BNP. That is what Manager Premium does, protection of transactional endpoints."
"In terms of the security provided, the benefits from the use of the product are immediately visible."
"The most valuable features of Akamai Bot Manager are the seamless integration and accuracy with which it detects the bots that can make attacks."
"Based on the telemetry, Akamai Bot Manager gives a rough estimate of all the hits and requests we get, which are suspected bots."
"Akamai Bot Manager has more advanced rules that allow it to detect and block bot scrapers."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is stable."
"An improvement has been to our website: It increases the speed of our response, the capacity of the site, and optimizes the bandwidth.​"
"We have peace of mind that nobody will use malware on us or try to hack our website."
"They're quite easy to install and quite easy to set up. Clients really like that. Especially when you're dealing with the cloud, it's really easy."
"Its unique interface for managing security performance and ease of use are the most valuable features of this solution."
"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"
"On the site security, I can see which countries have incidents, whether it was a robot attack, a real human user, or non-human user."
"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."
 

Cons

"We cannot block illegitimate web scrapers because Akamai Bot Manager does not provide detailed information about various origins and remote VPNs they come through."
"In my opinion, the UI of Akamai Bot Manager is a bit unconventional and not as intuitive as one might expect."
"I feel that customer support has certain concerns where improvements are required."
"I would say there is definitely a need of improvement because I think some start of this year or even, like one and a half years. But now have enough resources at their end especially with the, advanced AI and everything. So they have enough resources to launch basic bot attacks. And whenever we do some type of fine tuning, they are always somehow able to evade it or just fly under the threshold. And from our end, we also have to maintain those threshold so that we still do not start blocking the real general customer. So every time when they try to do something else, we have to see their traffic patterns and then find you in our solution.When these bot attacks happen, what we have to do is we have to check their, traffic patterns, their IT sees and then do the proper analysis. And based on that, the fine tuning is done. So I would say, like, based on these bot traffic, if there is a automatic fine tuning. With the help of machine learning at all, then that would be much more easier of beneficial. So this needs improvement."
"There is a clear need for improvement. Over the past year or so, we've observed an increase in the sophistication of attacks, with some occurring at the start of this year or even extending back one and a half years. Despite having ample resources, particularly with the advent of advanced AI, these entities can now execute basic bot attacks."
"There are other rules that are user-friendly, however, many of the things have a learning curve. This is not something you enter into lightly."
"Akamai Bot Manager Premier has some additional functionalities, particularly for web telemetry, but they don't have it for app telemetry."
"Akamai Bot Manager can improve by having better SDK integration. SDK would be required to integrate with any mobile applications and if they are able to make that more seamless, it will help."
"The UI interface needs improvement."
"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."
"Some of the features should be included in the next release is a file integrating monitoring tool. This feature should be improved."
"The cost could be lower; our end clients need to have a high budget to purchase this solution."
"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."
"There’s nothing that’s missing in terms of features."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by providing better features, such as improved prevention of zero-day attacks. Additionally, it should include a VR meta-analysis."
"It's quite expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have to pay a bundled cost."
"The price of Akamai Bot Manager could improve."
"You buy a license of the product based on a certain volume, but if you hit the volume and go above it, then you are charged additional for each GB you use. I think you need to pay 20,000 per month."
"Akamai Bot Manager is a very expensive solution."
"Akamai Bot Manager requires a separate license that sits on top of Kona or Akamai Web Application Protector."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall's pricing is expensive."
"The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay."
"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."
"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."
"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
24%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business83
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise61
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Akamai Bot Manager?
The best feature is the BNP. That is what Manager Premium does, protection of transactional endpoints.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Bot Manager?
You buy a license of the product based on a certain volume, but if you hit the volume and go above it, then you are charged additional for each GB you use. I think you need to pay 20,000 per month.
What needs improvement with Akamai Bot Manager?
In terms of the need for improvement, I feel that it is a continuous cycle where Akamai keeps updating the databases. There are new emerging threats, risks, and sources from which threats can emerg...
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

No data available
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Luisa Via Roma, Gymgrossisten, Rakuten, U.S. News & World Report, Japan Airlines
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Bot Manager vs. Imperva Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,029 professionals have used our research since 2012.