Cloudflare vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Imperva DDoS comparison

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

F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.

BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

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.”