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Cloudflare vs Human Defense Platform 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

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare16.2%
Arbor DDoS8.7%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.5%
Other66.6%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Fraud Detection and Prevention Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Human Defense Platform1.3%
ThreatMetrix6.4%
BioCatch4.0%
Other88.3%
Fraud Detection and Prevention
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Imperva Application Security Platform8.5%
Cloudflare16.2%
Arbor DDoS8.7%
Other66.6%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
it_user785406 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager/Team Leader at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
They ensure that our campaigns have run in the highest quality of settings, leading to savings on ad spending
Primary use case of this solution is to detect fraud traffic (also mark the network which is sending the fraud traffic) and block the fraud traffic. These metrics help us to minimize wasted ad spend and provide our clients an extra layer of confidence around our campaigns As a result of the…
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 UI is good."
"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."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"If you don't want to spend too much time hosting your own DNS server or managing the domain, Cloudflare is a great way to rapidly get websites and services online."
"The initial setup is extremely easy but will require access to your Domain Name Servers."
"The setup and configuration is also easy to perform and their support is excellent."
"In my opinion, CloudFlare is one of the best CDN networks I have ever used."
"PerimeterX helped us to ensure that our campaigns have run in the highest quality of settings, leading to savings on ad spending."
"Scalability has been pretty good, our European traffic has doubled and our sales have gone up along with our stability."
"The most valuable features are DDoS protection."
"The dynamic profiling of websites is the solution's most valuable feature. The security is also good."
"It is easy to use and has good security."
"The valuable features of Imperva WAF include its effective security breach prevention through automatically updating rules."
"It blocks all types of attacks."
"Imperva solutions are the best in terms of stability."
"Incapsula provides a very simple to install and configure solution, that can be up and running in minutes."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"It looks like they don't support as many TLDs as other registrars, but since they are very new as a registrar, I expect this may improve soon."
"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed."
"For the services I am using, it is a bit expensive."
"However, what I still fail to understand is that why aren't they offering domains themselves."
"The pricing could be improved."
"As bots are getting better and the product should keep getting updates in preventing new ways of attack and security."
"Imperva should have more points of presence in Africa."
"The signature updates could be faster."
"Although we're only using it for the accelerator part, the purging of files and the way this feature functions could use improvement."
"I am not sure if this application has a policy where you can create your custom policy and run it as our firewall. We should have some ability to also create some custom policy, then run it as a firewall."
"Analytics in the area of risk need to be improved to supply more information to the users for creating better environments."
"Technical support is probably the biggest drawback."
"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
Information not available
"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"It is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category."
"It is a very affordable solution."
"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"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."
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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
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business84
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise62
 

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.
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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 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
PerimeterX Bot Defender, BotGuard for Applications, HUMAN MediaGuard
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
 

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.
theTradeDesk
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Radware, Cloudflare, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: March 2026.
885,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.