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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Barracuda Web Application Firewall is 2.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiWeb is 7.8%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 7.8%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Fortinet FortiWeb7.8%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.8%
Barracuda Web Application Firewall2.0%
Other82.4%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Shahzad Abid - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Information Technology at College of Physicians & Surgeons Pakistan
Has protected our legacy applications effectively but has required constant manual filtering due to false positives
I assess the effectiveness of the machine learning-driven threat detection in Barracuda Web Application Firewall as sometimes behaving abnormally, often showing me false positive attacks, so I have to fix these attacks from time to time. From a stability point of view, I would definitely rate Barracuda Web Application Firewall a seven out of ten. There is definitely some room for improvement; nothing is perfect in the world. I am not satisfied with the technical support from Barracuda. I am somewhat disappointed with the technical support that I have received so far. Whenever I generate a ticket for my problem, it goes to the Indian support team, and they all the time start with the most junior team member, consuming all my precious time. At the end, I have to close that ticket without any satisfactory solution. I have complained that they should shift my support to any other region because I don't need Indian support; they are simply pathetic and not up to mark. To improve Barracuda Web Application Firewall, customers should be given ongoing training opportunities regarding the product and its features. I am not familiar with many features that are available, only using those which are necessary for my applications. I believe Barracuda must provide clearer product information or training sessions to make it more user-friendly, as sometimes its interface can be rigid and lacking in helpful resources or user tutorials about its features. For it to get closer to a ten, I think advanced reporting is missing because, as I mentioned earlier, there are many false positive events being recorded. Often, when I analyze these attacks, they turn out to be genuine customers or users interacting with my product, but Barracuda tags them as attackers. Reducing false positives must be a priority.
HameedAhmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Joint Director at PAA
Security threats have been reduced through seamless deployment and strong integration with other tools
I have used Fortinet FortiWeb's integration features. We have easily integrated all of the applications with the product. Most of the applications we are using are in-house built. My technical team is looking after the best features. I have not used it extensively for maybe two and a half years. I have been involved in the installation, but I am not actually using the product. I work with it from time to time but not extensively. I would assess Fortinet FortiWeb's adaptive machine learning and artificial intelligence as having new patches installed regarding artificial intelligence, but when we bought it, I think the learning feature was there. Now they have installed artificial intelligence features through patches. We have a complete portfolio of Fortinet in our organization, including FortiMail, Fortinet FortiWeb, and FortiGate, along with multi-factor authentication. All of the products are from Fortinet. Fortinet tools integrate with each other and work in conjunction. I think Fortinet FortiWeb has helped us meet regulatory compliance because we are not a regulatory organization, but our sister organization is regulatory. We have regulatory compliance with the International Civil Aviation Authority, whose audit teams have checked our data center and these security products, and they are satisfied with us. The question about leveraging Fortinet FortiWeb's automated policy management does not pertain to my domain because I am not so technical, but I am in a management role now. My engineer is more technical than me. I would rate this product an eight point five out of ten.
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 updating and signature features are my primary use case for the solution. These features are beneficial to my organization."
"The stability of the solution is good. I don't think we've experienced bugs, crashes, or glitches."
"The product's advanced bot and threat protection capabilities are valuable."
"Data leak prevention is very important and ensures protection against attacks."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward, especially if you enlist assistance."
"The solution's most valuable feature is that it actually protects our website, and it provides all the required security functions."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Web Application Firewall include advanced bot protection, DDoS protection, and addressing the top ten vulnerabilities."
"It is stable and the performance is good."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiWeb is the ease of integration and configuration."
"FortiWeb's ease of deployment is what we liked the most about it. Implementing FortiWeb was extremely fast and easy, which was a significant advantage. It comes with several preconfigured rule sets and templates."
"It is good for web tracking applications."
"One main feature we are very happy about is file security and upload functionality."
"The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats."
"I believe it is the best option on the market."
"When we had Cisco we had around thirty thousand entries on our firewalls. Now we are down to three thousand. Fortinet has a mechanism to detect all of your entries which are not used, and it can clean it up."
"FortiGate is a stable product."
"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."
"The solution has a very good interface."
"Simplifies putting everything in code."
"It blocks all types of attacks."
"Protection is the best solution since it has profile functionality."
"The most valuable feature of Imperva DDoS is to make our website available for our customers' requests 24 hours a day."
"I am impressed with the product's automatic bot mechanism. It also gives us the control to create our own custom bot rules."
"The compliance is the most valuable aspect."
 

Cons

"They should improve their features, so they easily compare to the competition."
"They could improve their performance, support, and their upgrades. Their updates used to be good. Their improvements were right on the money but nowadays, the updates are minor."
"I have issues with the load balancing of the solution which is slow. The connection pooling in Barracuda also doesn't work. There is an issue when someone needs access to a site quickly. The issue is with HTTPS services. I am not sure if they have changed all these in the solution’s latest version."
"I would like to see an improved capacity to store logs so that they will be available for a longer time."
"The policy updates could be improved."
"Barracuda Web Application Firewall lacks some of the more specified and structured features offered by solutions like Tenable."
"As most people are aware, the implementation is not easy."
"The documentation is lacking. It's not like what you'd get if you were using Juniper or Cisco. They need to expand on it and make it more useful."
"F5 and some other firewalls are easier to customize. FortiWeb could be more flexible and customizable. The documentation could also be improved because many of the advanced features aren't fully documented."
"I would like to see more improvements with respect to threat intelligence."
"When there is downtime at their data center, it becomes a transit point issue for us, causing downtime in our environment as well."
"FortiWeb Web Application Firewall's signature database updates could be improved."
"The initial setup in our data center was somewhat complex."
"It can be better with web application firewalls."
"It would be good if the solution integrated with other solutions, like SAP."
"The interface could have the interdependent elements arranged sequentially and wizards that go through most common deployment actions."
"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."
"Sometimes, it takes a bit of time for the technical staff of the solution to get back to our company with a resolution for our problems."
"Sometimes our web application firewall will slow down."
"I would like the solution to improve its support response time."
"The reporting is missing some features, such as: only two export formats, and the time period does not include the last day, week, year."
"The user interface could be better."
"The only disadvantage of Imperva is that it is a pretty costly solution."
"I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators of compromise."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable, more so than other products."
"Cost is a bit on the higher side. Big companies can afford it."
"While I would have to check on the price of the solution, I feel it to be okay and it matches the market price."
"For small companies, the price is very expensive because the WAF is an enterprise-level application, not intended for smaller businesses. In my opinion, the price is right for enterprise-level use."
"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The price of the solution is a little expensive. There is a license for this solution and it can be purchased every one, two, or five years."
"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."
"​The pricing is reasonable."
"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb depends from customer to customer because some customers are considering using other solutions, such as Imperva. The price of Fortinet FortiWeb sits well for the middle-sized customers that we deal with."
"All our Fortinet pricing is bundled together for different products, like FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiWeb. FortiWeb, by itself, is probably around $2,500 to $3,500."
"The pricing is average; the product is neither particularly expensive nor affordable."
"Cheaper than others."
"​It really pays off to buy licences for multiple years​."
"There are no licensing costs."
"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb is reasonable. This is one of the key factors of why we use this solution."
"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."
"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"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."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."
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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
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business60
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise36
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business83
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise61
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
I am not using the API protection feature right now because I don't host any APIs through Barracuda Web Application F...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
At the time I was acquiring Barracuda Web Application Firewall, I found it costly compared to other products. To over...
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?
The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?
The pricing for Fortinet FortiWeb varies with different models having different prices. It depends on the requirement...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
There is room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb. The team was only from FortiGate itself. They are making new firm...
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 mana...
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 provi...
 

Also Known As

No data available
FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar
Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: February 2026.
881,821 professionals have used our research since 2012.