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Cloudflare vs Imperva Application Security Platform vs Windows Azure CDN 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 June 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 15.8%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 7.5%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windows Azure CDN is 2.9%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare15.8%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.5%
Windows Azure CDN2.9%
Other73.8%
CDN
 

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.
reviewer2818155 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Associate at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Application protection has improved and reporting and dashboards still need refinement
I believe Imperva Application Security Platform should have a more interactive wizard. While the dashboard is good, it could be more eye-catching. Based on my perspective, I recommend modifying the dashboards, especially the main dashboard where I can see the traffic hit count, alerts, and other latest information. In terms of reporting, I find it challenging to create reports; in my earlier days, it was difficult. Over time, I have learned how to create reports, but it should be easier to do so. I have used other tools such as firewalls or SolarWinds, where creating a report is straightforward and does not take much time, unlike in Imperva, where I have to add many elements. Modifications in the integration aspects would also be beneficial.
reviewer2273484 - PeerSpot reviewer
Pre Sales at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Has provided exceptional performance for handling high web traffic
In my opinion, Windows Azure CDN is one of the best CDNs. We tried to replace it and made a business case to check other options such as Cloudflare, and we are using Cloudflare and tried Akamai, wanting to explore alternatives from OCI. One of the best features of Windows Azure CDN is that it has integrated WAF; it is not only CDN alone and it is a very smart and capable WAF. Windows Azure CDN is easily integrated with Azure services such as Azure Storage and Azure Web Apps, and sometimes we are using just Azure Front Door while the back end and database will be on OCI. The impact of Windows Azure CDN's dynamic content acceleration on our application performance is very significant. For one of our clients, we could not use anything other than Azure Front Door.

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."
"There is no service as mature as Cloudflare that is also as easy to use, reliable, and hosted from excellent infrastructure."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"Their free account offers an awful lot of functionality and savings alone, before you get on to the minimal $20 a month for a Pro account which comes with its own great list of features."
"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 tool is user-friendly."
"It's very user-friendly."
"The WAF itself has been very valuable to me because it has such a complete range of features. Another reason why I like it is because it also takes care of the total overview of the traffic over the network."
"The setup of Imperva DDoS was easy and we are satisfied with the pricing."
"Well, just by using the security rules to block all secured areas by IP minimized the chance of sensitive data leaking outside."
"Very scalable and very stable firewall for web applications, with a good interface in its cloud version. Mitigation is its most valuable feature. The technical support for this product is also good."
"Its inline transferring mode is the most valuable because it is 100% transparent. When you change the IP, there is no change on the network side. If you can't and want to try to reach an IP, you can reach the server IP. There are many other advanced security features in it. The smallest appliances of Imperva can handle the highest traffic at a customer site. For example, a smaller appliance from Imperva can provide you the same security as an F5 product."
"Their support team is great and you get a response/resolution within five minutes of submitting a support ticket."
"The dynamic profiling of websites is the solution's most valuable feature. The security is also good."
"The dashboard is good and user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of Windows Azure CDN is its effectiveness."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that one can access Windows Azure CDN from anywhere."
"The UI is very intuitive."
"The fact that it just delivers what it is supposed to do is its most valuable feature...The initial setup is very straightforward."
"I like that CDN offers a routing feature."
"The geolocation feature is very important because many colleagues travel worldwide and need to access information from anywhere. The product has improved security."
"It is a stable solution."
"One of the tool's best features is its ability to handle edge cases. For instance, we encountered a situation where we needed to remove certain files from public access. The solution offered a purge feature that allowed us to remove these files. This feature ensured that the files were deleted from all edge servers. Subsequently, we were able to upload new versions of the files."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to not need a separate server for non-www redirection under the CNAME setup option."
"Access to the solution's dashboards is not intended for a service company. You are practically blind, and to validate a problem, you must view the customer's screen."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"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."
"It would be beneficial to include vulnerability management in the solution, similar to what they have for their on-premise solution."
"It should be more user-friendly. Like other web solutions, it would be helpful to be able to easily do policy configuration and identification inside the application. Understanding the in-depth configuration of a policy is somewhat difficult for an engineer, and they can improve that."
"They need to work on the customer support; in my opinion, this is their weakest point. Some of their support representatives really have no idea how their service works."
"The product could use a broader scope in the area of policies."
"There are times that we experienced downtime or crashes with Imperva Application Security Platform; there were times that it crashed, it did not load, and we had to wait until it was fine."
"It would be better if we were able to manage and apply changes to multiple websites/web applications, and search WAF logs for multiple websites, via the Incapsula dashboard."
"Because of all these services, you need to look at the company's services budget."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"I believe Windows Azure CDN can improve monitoring and measuring overall end-user performance. Providing monitoring tools or agents that can be integrated into our pages would be highly beneficial. Setting up a custom domain with Windows Azure CDN involves proving domain ownership, which can take some time. The process is relatively straightforward if your DNS or domain registrar is already integrated with Microsoft. However, the verification process may be more time-consuming if you use a different service provider."
"Windows Azure CDN should lower its prices."
"We have experienced issues with switch connectivity."
"There were a few bugs that were very disappointing. So, that is a part of the reason why we started using Fastly."
"It is not a weakness of Windows Azure CDN; rather, it is the fact that it is outside Saudi Arabia, leading to some regulation issues."
"Exploring shared access solutions with cloud accounts would be a beneficial choice."
"The response time of the support team must be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A free version of the solution is available."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"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."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"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 data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"It is expensive."
"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."
"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."
"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."
"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."
"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."
"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."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The pricing is extremely high, almost 9 out of 10."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The solution's price depends on how much traffic you have. So, it was okay for us. Payments are to be made on a monthly basis since one has to pay for what they used."
"The solution's price is above the medium range."
"I rate the price of Windows Azure CDN a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is high."
"It comes at a relatively affordable cost."
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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
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business88
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise70
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Windows Azure CDN?
In terms of pricing for Windows Azure CDN and the whole Microsoft products, you cannot compare networking alone or co...
What needs improvement with Windows Azure CDN?
It is not a weakness of Windows Azure CDN; rather, it is the fact that it is outside Saudi Arabia, leading to some re...
What is your primary use case for Windows Azure CDN?
We are using Windows Azure CDN, Azure AI capability for a translator, Azure Front Door for CDN, and from Microsoft's ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
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.
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
NORAD, Agreeya Mobility
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Imperva, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in CDN. Updated: May 2026.
896,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.