We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and Imperva Web Application Firewall based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, F5 Advanced WAF seems to be the marginally superior solution. Our reviewers find that Imperva Web Application Firewall‘s cost makes it prohibitive for some organizations to afford.
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the easy identification of events and customization. We can pinpoint our settings."
"The most valuable feature is that it is secure."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are SSL uploading, signature, and anomaly detection. It is overall a high-quality solution."
"We can monitor IP locations, but we have constraints from each country. It has a replication feature. Licenses can be shared, taking turns with each license."
"My favorite feature of F5 is the ability to play around with the ciphers. I also like the ability to have an immediate display of the support IDs when a real blockage occurs. The protection offered is great."
"The solution uses AI to protect against botnet attacks."
"Good technology for mitigating different application attacks, e.g. DDoS, DNS, and layer seven attacks."
"The most important feature I have found to be the ease in how to do the backup and restores."
"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."
"The solution can scale."
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"The solution integrates seamlessly with other tools and has a good alert mechanism."
"The most valuable features of the Imperva Web Application Firewall are performance and flexibility. We can extend or customize the box itself."
"Imperva WAF's strongest features are the detection of web application threats and vulnerabilities in the source code."
"For me, an area for improvement in F5 Advanced WAF is the reporting as it isn't so clear. The vendor needs to work on the reporting capability of the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of F5 Advanced WAF is threat intelligence to protect your web application, particularly having that capability out-of-the-box, and not needing to pay extra for it, similar to what's offered in FortiWeb, for example, any request that originates from a malicious IP will be blocked automatically by FortiWeb. F5 Advanced WAF should have the intelligence for blocking malicious IPs, or automatically blocking threats included in the license, instead of making it an add-on feature that users have to pay for apart from the standard licensing fees."
"The interface is old-looking, it's not modern, which is why it's not always comfortable to use."
"The solution should include protection against web page attacks like what is available in FortiWeb."
"F5 Advanced needs to improve its bot protection. The solution needs to have machine learning to learn the behavior of the customer to recognize the human versus the bot. This is a difficult feature to explain to our customers. I would like documentation about the bot feature to make it easier for the customer to understand."
"There should be more ability to rate limit certain scenarios. The majority of the time, it is either on or off. For certain types of use cases, there should be the ability to rate limit, not just enable or disable."
"The deployment side is quite complex."
"There is a gap in report management."
"It should be a little bit easy to deploy in terms of the overall deployment session. One of our customers is a bit unhappy about the reporting options. Currently, it automatically deletes event logs after some limit if a customer doesn't have any external Syslog server. It is a problem for those customers who want to review event logs after a week or so because they won't get proper reports or event logs. They should increase the duration to at least a month or two for storing the data on the device. F5 is not a leader in Gartner Quadrant, which affects us when we go and pitch this solution. Customers normally go and take a look at such annual reports, and because F5 is currently not there as a leader, the customers ask about it even though we are saying it is good in all things. F5 is not known for something totally different or unique. They were a major player in ADP, and they are just rebranding themselves into security. They should improve or increase their marketing as a security company now. They have already started to do that, but they should do it more so that when it comes to security, customers can easily remember F5. At the moment, if we say F5, load balancing comes to mind. With rebranding and marketing, all customers should get the idea that F5 is now mainly focusing on the security part of it, and it is a security company instead of load balancing. This is the first solution that should come to a customer's mind for a web application firewall."
"Sometimes our web application firewall will slow down."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by providing better features, such as improved prevention of zero-day attacks. Additionally, it should include a VR meta-analysis."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by adding more features to the dashboard. increasing the visibility of the real-time events, besides configuring the administration itself."
"The solution works for particular zones but isn't always the best solution for all zones."
"I am looking for more data enrichment. We should have the ability to add our own custom data to the system, to the live traffic."
"It would be nice to have more security control over mobile applications so I would suggest adding more mobile security features. It would also be beneficial to see improvements in regards to interface bandwidth performance, CPU time, and RAM size. Learning capability of the device is quite weak."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a good system, but we found that the visibility of the diverse-path server, e.g. where the traffic is coming from, the different IPs, etc., needs improvement."
"The support for the on-premises version needs improvement."
More Imperva Web Application Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
F5 Advanced WAF is ranked 4th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 28 reviews while Imperva Web Application Firewall is ranked 7th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 17 reviews. F5 Advanced WAF is rated 8.4, while Imperva Web Application Firewall is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of F5 Advanced WAF writes "Extremely stable hardware with great plug-ins and excellent features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Imperva Web Application Firewall writes "Simple to maintain, easy to configure, and easy to scale". F5 Advanced WAF is most compared with Fortinet FortiWeb, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX App Protect, AWS WAF and Azure Front Door, whereas Imperva Web Application Firewall is most compared with AWS WAF, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Imperva DDoS, Fortinet FortiWeb and Azure Front Door. See our F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall report.
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We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
