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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Imperva's Application Security Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
Barracuda Web Application F...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (17th)
Imperva's Application Secur...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (20th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Anne-Aimee Wollerich - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing bot traffic effectively enhances usability for non-technical users
Barracuda Web Application Firewall lacks some of the more specified and structured features offered by solutions like Tenable. Although Tenable is more expensive and less easily deployable, its features are more deepened and chiseled, particularly for IT personnel. For example, Tenable provides more comprehensive dark web scanning capabilities, which Barracuda could improve upon.
DerrickAkankwasa - PeerSpot reviewer
Provide DDoS protection and better security at effective rate
It is expanding its number of data centers for scrubbing traffic. Currently, there is only one POP for cleaning in South Africa. They might add another POP in North Africa, possibly in Nigeria or Egypt. Latency concerns customers, especially in regions like East and West Africa, where traffic has to travel to South Africa before returning. Increasing the number of POPs across the continent would help address these latency issues and improve overall service. While the platform is already quite strong, there’s always room for improvement, especially in keeping up with emerging trends and new types of attacks. Enhancing security capabilities could be beneficial. Integrating more advanced AI features could significantly improve its effectiveness and help customers leverage these tools more effectively. It would be great to see more focus on AI integration to handle and analyze data more efficiently.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"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."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"We use Barracuda to protect the application. That's the main feature we use it for."
"The solution ensures layer seven is secure from attacks."
"It is stable and the performance is good."
"Our customers value the solution's simplicity."
"The updating and signature features are my primary use case for the solution. These features are beneficial to my organization."
"The product has fantastic support services."
"I find the solution very stable."
"The product's advanced bot and threat protection capabilities are valuable."
"An improvement has been to our website: It increases the speed of our response, the capacity of the site, and optimizes the bandwidth.​"
"On the real time, you can see live traffic, which is flowing into our website."
"The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition."
"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."
"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 DDoS is fairly stable, and its availability is quite high."
"Simplifies putting everything in code."
"The solution is very good at intercepting traffic before it gets to our data centers."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"Support response time could be improved."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"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."
"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."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"The platform's pricing needs improvement."
"The GUI needs to be improved because it sometimes hangs and needs to be restarted."
"The reporting aspect of the solution needs improvement. I don't find that it's very good. They could do some work on it to make it much better. It's not that the reporting isn't secure. It's just that I would prefer to store my reports for an extended period of time. Right now, that's not possible and I'd prefer it if that could change. I also would say that the reports themselves are expensive."
"The solution needs to leverage some additional features to a broader scale of software-defined networks."
"I would suggest that someone implementing this product is knowledgeable in the IT field, and with the network needs. It is complex."
"Barracuda Web Application Firewall’s scalability needs improvement."
"There are false positives that I am receiving when compared to other WAFs."
"In the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, there should be more affordable options for WAF as a service."
"I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators of compromise."
"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."
"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."
"Imperva always needs to adjust to new versions of cyber attacks, it needs to be faster, improve the resiliency of the software of the solution."
"It needs to be improved every time there are new attacks."
"Certificate management could be improved."
"We faced issues regarding compliance with client procedures. The client had strict compliance rules, and Imperva needed to be on a VM, while the client required containerization, causing a conflict. They went with Imperva for the on-premise version but shelved the cloud project due to too many blockers."
"A limited tool if you're looking to customize."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A free version of the solution is available."
"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."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"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 product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"They have competitive pricing."
"Our licensing fees are paid annually and the cost is between €600 and €800 (approximately $665.00 to $885.00 USD)."
"The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is quite expensive."
"The product is inexpensive."
"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 pricing is reasonable."
"The price is reasonable, more so than other products."
"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"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."
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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
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business54
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise40
 

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...
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...
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.
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?
Our primary use case was to track the traffic on websites or webshops to identify potential malicious actors, such as...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
The pricing for Barracuda is quite high compared to other OEMs. Each transaction requires my purchase team to negotia...
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...
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators o...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Imperva's Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.