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Cloudflare vs Imperva DDoS vs Sucuri 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 May 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.6%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 6.5%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sucuri is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Syed Ubaid Ali Jafri - PeerSpot reviewer
I like the content monitoring feature which I haven't seen in other WAF solutions.
They could improve by minimizing false positive results. Although this occurs less with Imperva, we would like to see some further improvements. We have been using this product for last 1 years, it's result is very impressive. But due to the excessive load on the Web site where thousands of requests‎ are generated from legitimate users, however the request in which any sequential or specialised characters are requested would be directly blocked by impreva . Currently imperva blocks the special character request generated from the user, as I conduct a test where I am parsing the encoded html values of the same special characters to the input field, imperva bypasses these encoded values for example : ' i.e. %27 or / i.e %2F, the WAF bypasses these encoded characters. I hope that this device should have a capability to detect the pattern which is associated with Xss or Xsrf, rather then by not blocking the request which contains any special characters.
David Shlingbaum - PeerSpot reviewer
Simple solution and good WAF
Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section. Users get errors or EBAs, and if they want to read about it, they need to find it in the help section of the site. It would be more helpful to allow users to see more information and tips immediately from within the alert.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"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."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"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."
"​Technical support provides good, quick responses."
"Real-time monitoring is also a great tool, as you may watch several parameters in real time."
"The dashboard is good and user-friendly."
"Technical support was very helpful."
"It is a stable solution."
"It fits our requirements, as well as our budget."
"An improvement has been to our website: It increases the speed of our response, the capacity of the site, and optimizes the bandwidth.​"
"Imperva Incapsula has many valuable features. One, it protects the top 10 OWAS vulnerability, the open web application software platform, this is standard. Secondly, it protects against broken authentication. As well, it has remote execution of code."
"I use it as a WAF, which is basically a web firewall to monitor and block traffic to our web server."
"Domain name scanning since it allows us to scan all our domain names and determine whether it has malware or if is reported as phishing."
"It significantly eases the workload and streamlines the initial setup required to protect a website."
"The most valuable part is the analytics and visualization."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"The initial setup was straightforward. Straight forward because the plugin can simply be installed and then it does its job. It's not complex, there is no learning curve. The online scan is simple, you put in the website address and the scan gives us a report on the browser itself. It's simple to use."
 

Cons

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"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."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"Analytics in the area of risk need to be improved to supply more information to the users for creating better environments."
"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."
"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."
"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."
"The solution needs to improve Integration with third parties for their on-prem deployment models. The integration is not that good yet."
"The product could use a broader scope in the area of policies."
"We would like them to hire people in Sweden because it's quite hard when people are sitting in the UK or Belgium because some of the customers really want them to be local."
"Imperva DDoS does not provide version control."
"Confident score: Currently it does not have one and there are cases that most websites flagged are false-positives."
"Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section."
"I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that we have found sometimes customers or Google saying that there is something wrong with the website but Sucuri says that the site is clean so we do have to look at the site manually which means that the Sucuri scan does not pick up anything and everything."
"The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I would include more sites in the protection."
"It would greatly benefit customers if they implemented an online chat or messaging system for quicker assistance."
"In terms of improvement, the cost factor is always there."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"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."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"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."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing."
"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."
"The solution's price is high for small companies."
"The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay."
"It stands out as a more cost-effective option compared to other cloud-based security services like Cloudflare or JetPass."
"I’d simply say it’s really worth it."
"Sucuri offers different plans, both the standard plan and an advanced plan. So there are different plans to choose from."
"The ROI has been very good. Because of the solution, I have a tax break. The site developers were not always experienced people. We used to pay more for cleaning up the site when it was infected. Now, we have peace of mind knowing that the solution will clean up the site and that we won't have to go through the unnecessary process of restoring it from a backup. The protection on the WAF and the measures for backups have also prevented our site from going down."
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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
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
41%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 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 is rated a ten on a scale where ten is very expensive. The solution is only cloud-based and does not prov...
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive. Additionally, support response times for emails can sometimes be d...
What do you like most about Sucuri?
The initial setup was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sucuri?
The pricing is very reasonable. Sucuri offer other features as an add-on, such as backup, but these have an additiona...
What needs improvement with Sucuri?
The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I woul...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Incapsula
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.
The Loft Salon, Tom McFarlin, WPBeginner, Taylor Town, Everything Everywhere, Financial Ducks in a Row, Chubstr, Real Advice Gal, Sujan Patel, Wallao, List25, School the World
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: May 2025.
851,471 professionals have used our research since 2012.