Cloudflare vs Imperva DDoS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Ranking in CDN
1st
Ranking in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th)
Imperva DDoS
Ranking in CDN
6th
Ranking in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 20.2%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 8.4%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
Unique Categories:
CDN
21.9%
Managed DNS
111.6%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
2.1%
 

Featured Reviews

Binuprasad Madhu - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 5, 2023
The API enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution
We use Cloudflare for our DNS service.  We previously faced so many issues with our in-house DNS servers. Cloudflare provides a backup, so if you have any issues with your environment or something goes wrong with a software hostname and IP address, you can run the backup and experience zero…
it_user609369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 14, 2017
Provides PCI-level IDS/IPS.
Easy-to-set-up CDN with PCI-level IDS/IPS We offer Incapsula for every customer project we host, as a default. The default service is great! I have used it for two years. Sometimes, the SSL setup can be a bit slow/inconsistent. There was only one minor incident with service availability, if I…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"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."
"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."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"Imperva DDoS is fairly stable, and its availability is quite high."
"IncapRules is one of the most valuable features, as you can create your own security and access control rules on top of your security policy. Using IncapRules we were able to easily block Layer 7 DDoS attacks several times."
"On the real time, you can see live traffic, which is flowing into our website."
"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."
"It fits our requirements, as well as our budget."
"The most valuable features are DDoS protection."
"There are quite a few useful Imperva Incapsula features. For example, one of them is the reports. The graphics are very good and it's easy to configure. The whole process is very fast and reliable too. They have good tech support as well."
"Integration with IBM AS/400 and Db2 is okay."
 

Cons

"The product needs to improve its automation."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"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."
"Technical support is lacking."
"DNS Management."
"Incapsula services also provides load balancing services for their service IP address environment. So far, with monitoring their services, the IP address was only changed once."
"Imperva now offers add-ons to add functionality, but I would like to see these included in the product, even if it would cost more."
"The solution should integrate with something that looks at continuous security management."
"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."
"I miss being able to integrate the dashboard with other BI tools we are using. We have to export and import data to be able to present it, and doing so is a lot of work."
"A limited tool if you're looking to customize."
"Analytics in the area of risk need to be improved to supply more information to the users for creating better environments."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"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."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"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."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
"It is expensive."
"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."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"The solution's price is high for small companies."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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 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 Incapsula?
The solution is very affordable. It's based on the traffic utilization, the average traffic utilization, not the DDoS traffic. Therefore, if you're being DDoSed, you don't pay extra for the absorpt...
What needs improvement with Imperva Incapsula?
It’s hard to think of an improvement. The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition. You would ordinarily say something like API protection. However, they've got t...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Incapsula
 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Imperva DDoS and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.