Akamai vs Imperva DDoS comparison

Akamai and Imperva are both solutions in the CDN category. Akamai is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6, while Imperva is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.3. Akamai holds a 17.3% mindshare in CDN, compared to Imperva’s 6.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Akamai and Imperva DDoS are competing products providing robust protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. While Akamai leads in customer support and pricing satisfaction, Imperva DDoS stands out with its advanced features, offering greater perceived value.

Features: Akamai provides comprehensive global traffic management, dynamic site acceleration, and enhanced security measures focusing on reliability. Imperva DDoS excels with advanced threat intelligence, automated attack mitigation, and superior dashboard functionalities prioritizing proactive protection.

Room for Improvement: Akamai could enhance user interface design, increase flexibility in policy configuration, and improve integration with third-party services. Imperva DDoS could provide more competitive pricing options, expand documentation and guidance for new users, and enhance integration capabilities with existing infrastructure.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai offers straightforward integration with strong service support, enabling efficient implementation. Similarly, Imperva DDoS provides a smooth deployment process with high praise for its responsive customer service team, with notable emphasis on customer service quality.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai is known for competitive pricing and notable ROI, particularly attractive for cost-conscious businesses. Imperva DDoS, though possibly higher in setup costs, is recognized for delivering high ROI due to its advanced features and threat management efficacy, with its extensive feature set justifying its value proposition.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai vs. Imperva DDoS Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai vs. Imperva DDoS

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

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.3%, up from 21.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai is 17.3%, up from 15.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 6.4%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

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.

Read full review

Aryan Singh1

Product Manager at Infozion

Offers great enterprise support, ideal for solutions requiring high scalability and seamless integration with AWS infrastructure

For Akamai, it is definitely one of the best tools out there. However, there are challenges with how their approach is designed for large enterprises. While it's great for solutions with high scalability, like global e-commerce, it's not really built for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It has too many options and can be complex for SMBs to utilize. That's the biggest challenge we faced when migrating to Akamai from other solutions, like Cloudflare. It can be difficult to migrate between platforms. Due to its great features but high activation thresholds. So, while it's a powerful tool, it has limitations for some implementations. It was difficult to migrate from and to Akamai. It is challenging when we are building a website.

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Syed Ubaid Ali Jafri

Head of Cyber Defense & Offensive Security at Habib Bank Limited

I like the content monitoring feature which I haven't seen in other WAF solutions.

They could improve by minimizing false positive results. Although this occurs less with Imperva, we would like to see some further improvements. We have been using this product for last 1 years, it's result is very impressive. But due to the excessive load on the Web site where thousands of requests‎ are generated from legitimate users, however the request in which any sequential or specialised characters are requested would be directly blocked by impreva . Currently imperva blocks the special character request generated from the user, as I conduct a test where I am parsing the encoded html values of the same special characters to the input field, imperva bypasses these encoded values for example : ' i.e. %27 or / i.e %2F, the WAF bypasses these encoded characters. I hope that this device should have a capability to detect the pattern which is associated with Xss or Xsrf, rather then by not blocking the request which contains any special characters.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

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

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"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."

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

More Cloudflare pros

"The initial setup is simple, especially for SaaS solutions."

"The solution's technical support is very prompt and good."

"It's a scalable and reliable solution."

"The most valuable feature in managing web traffic has been the ability to handle vertical scaling effectively."

"With 300 servers deployed worldwide, it's highly scalable and is the best web application firewall on the market."

"Akamai is leveraged by many top-level businesses, ensuring reliability and support in case of outages or issues."

"As of now, the best thing about Akamai is WAF, and though CDN is a good feature, it comes in second place when compared to WAF. I am very impressed with the WAF offered by Akamai."

"The worldwide reach of the Akamai CDN is one of the key values of this CDN and the agreements worldwide that they keep running."

More Akamai pros

"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."

"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."

"DDoS protection and WAF are the most valuable features. It is easy to deploy a service. It is easy and quick to deploy to a new website."

"There is no need to have an appliance in house for the services because it is on the cloud."

"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."

"Integration with IBM AS/400 and Db2 is okay."

"I like the user-friendly interface."

"On the activity log, I can see the exact details, the visit, and the threat."

More Imperva DDoS pros

Cons

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

More Cloudflare cons

"The product's scalability can be improved since certain shortcomings regarding the security part of the solution currently exist."

"Akamai's configuration part is an area of concern where improvements are required to make the process easy."

"It would be better if we could be notified about specific attacks."

"Akamai could improve by providing its own cloud services. We have to use third-party cloud services at this time, such as Amazon AWS. The offering becomes a lot easier for an SMB if everything was in one single platform to be used for the services."

"Caching strategy is an area with certain shortcomings in the solution where improvements are required."

"Akamai should improve its integrations."

"The fact that it is an expensive product is its only shortcoming."

"While it's great for solutions with high scalability, like global e-commerce, it's not really built for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It has too many options and can be complex for SMBs to utilize."

More Akamai cons

"The product could use a broader scope in the area of policies."

"A limited tool if you're looking to customize."

"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."

"Incapsula services also provides load balancing services for their service IP address environment. So far, with monitoring their services, the IP address was only changed once."

"It's quite expensive."

"Users would benefit from better documentation. There is official documentation, but sometimes we need more detail. We have some use cases that are not so run of the mill. It would be great if there was a knowledge base that we could go to for more answers."

"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."

"The log analytics interface within Incapsula isn't really good. For example, if you have to get all logs from there, it's a very cumbersome process."

More Imperva DDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

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

"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."

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

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The solution's pricing is based on bandwidth."

"Akamai is an expensive tool. Moreover, we have a pay-as-you-go model for additional features."

"The pricing of Akamai is moderate, in my opinion. My company makes yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to Akamai. There are no additional costs besides the licensing costs for the solution."

"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."

"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."

"Quite high in price, but equivalent to other enterprise products on the market"

"It is an expensive product. The licensing costs for the solution are based on the usage. If we need premium support, we need to buy it from Akamai."

"The solution can be one of the more expensive options, reflecting their established market position."

More Akamai pricing and cost advice

"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."

"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."

"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 a very expensive solution. The price is very high. A lot of customers tell us that they would love to use Imperva more. I have some customers who have 50 websites, but they have only 10 websites on Imperva because of the price. They would love to have all their websites running through Imperva, but they can't. They have to choose the more critical websites to protect because the price is very high. It is a very good product, but it is too expensive. If you buy a plan for 20 megabytes and you don't consume all of your 20 megabytes, it is okay, but if you consume more, you are charged for the superior traffic."

"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."

"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."

"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."

"We are satisfied with the pricing."

More Imperva DDoS pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user69348

Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 17, 2013

Akamai vs. CloudFlare – Simple Stats

In the world of CDNs Akamai is the incumbent 500 pound gorilla, no question. They have a HUGE global presence, super solid technology and networks, and have the most experience with large enterprise clients. However, now there other strong players in the CDN market. One of the most…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

21%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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...

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

What do you like most about Akamai?

The most valuable feature in managing web traffic has been the ability to handle vertical scaling effectively.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Akamai?

Akamai could improve by having a more robust and responsive support team. While the support is not bad, there is room...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Akamai?

We use Akamai ( /products/akamai-reviews ) as our CDN ( /categories/cdn ) to advertise prefixes and download traffic....

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Imperva DDoS?

The pricing is rated a ten on a scale where ten is very expensive. The solution is only cloud-based and does not prov...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?

Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive. Additionally, support response times for emails can sometimes be d...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Azure Front Door vs Akamai

Compared 21% of the time

Fastly vs Akamai

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon CloudFront vs Akamai

Compared 5% of the time

Windows Azure CDN vs Akamai

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Akamai

Compared 4% of the time

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Arbor DDoS vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 9% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 4% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 3% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Imperva DDoS

Compared 2% of the time

More Imperva DDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Akamai

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Imperva DDoS

April 2025

Download Imperva DDoS product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Imperva Incapsula

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

Akamai is a powerful solution that aims to enhance the performance and reliability of websites and applications. With features like excellent performance, robust security measures, and efficient content delivery, it optimizes user experience. It also offers bandwidth optimization, caching, online asset security, and protection against DDoS attacks. Users value its wide network coverage and reliable customer support.

Akamai

Imperva DDoS is a solution that offers protection for web applications and websites and all their associated business-critical data from cyberattacks. The cloud-based application delivery service helps improve user experiences by improving their performance. Through its security platform, Imperva DDoS also provides DDoS mitigation, a web application firewall, and a global load balancer, and includes a content delivery network — all designed to maximize performance.

Imperva DDoS Features

Imperva DDoS has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

API security
Web application firewall
Bot management
Application delivery
Runtime protection (RASP)
Discovery and assessment
Data protection
Data risk analytics
Data privacy
Application delivery control (ADC)
Content delivery network (CDN)
DDoS mitigation
Global server load-balancing (GSLB)
Web application firewall (WAF)
Client-side protection
Runtime protection

Imperva DDoS Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing Imperva DDoS. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduce web application risk: Imperva DDoS includes automatic policy creation and fast rule propagation that give your IT and security departments the ability to use third-party code without risk while working at the pace of DevOps.

Security from edge to database: Imperva DDoS’s WAF feature secures from edge to database, so the traffic you receive is only the traffic you want.

Safeguard sensitive and personal data: Imperva DDoS provides visibility into sensitive and personal data, with the controls to protect that data and the ability to unify management across cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid environments to help accommodate changing threats, new regulations, and challenging audits.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Imperva DDoS users.

PeerSpot user, Etienne W., CDN & Cybersecurity Engineer - Web performance & security at CDN Tech / Ecritel, says, “It is a good solution that allows us to protect websites. It is stable, scalable, quick and easy to use.” He goes on to explain, “WAF protection works almost out-of-the-box. The Anti-DDoS mitigation in less than 1s, I saw it many times in production, I can say it works. CDN has high performances, and the Smart Caching mode is really "smart" (you can do some efficient caching even if you're not a specialist). Its unique interface for managing security performance and ease of use are the most valuable features of this solution."

An IT Senior Manager at an outsourcing company mentions, “The most valuable features are DDoS protection. The Incapsula [Imperva DDoS] environment helps us monitor all the web activity. All the web activity is passed through their WAF cloud services, then that can help us to monitor those activities. That can help protect against DDoS hacking.”

Another PeerSpot reviewer, Ben D., Sales Executive at EVVO LABS, comments, "Imperva Incapsula [DDoS] has many valuable features. One, it protects the top 10 OWASP vulnerability, the open web application software platform, this is standard. Secondly, it protects against broken authentication. As well, it has remote execution of code."

A Solutions Architect at a financial services firm states, “The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is easy to configure. The solution keeps itself up to date itself and there's no customization that we need to do. It makes it extremely easy and cuts back on the amount of work required, and saves us on man-hours.”

Imperva

Sample Customers

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

Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Capital One, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Disney, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Home Depot, HP, IBM, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, LinkedIn, McDonald's, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Oracle, PayPal, Pinterest, Qualcomm, Rakuten, SAP, Spotify, Tesla, Toyota, Visa, Walmart, WeWork

Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.

Buyer's Guide

Akamai vs. Imperva DDoS

April 2025

Free Report: Akamai vs. Imperva DDoS

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai vs. Imperva DDoS and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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