F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Imperva Bot Management vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

The compared F5 and Imperva solutions aren't in the same category. F5 is ranked #2 in ADC , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 15.4% mindshare in the category. Imperva is ranked #7 in BM , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 6.4% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...

Read 121 F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) reviews

6,644 Views
5,506 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Imperva Bot Management

Read 2 Imperva Bot Management reviews

243 Views
199 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...

Read 3 The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) reviews

688 Views
498 Comparison Views

50% willing to recommend

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...

Imperva Bot Management

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Imperva Bot Management, and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetScaler, F5, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: April 2025).

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Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Bot Management

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Bonieber Orofeo

Information Security Manager at Chong Hua Hospital

Identifying compromised traffic and securing data has been a significant advantage

One of the most beneficial features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) ( /products/f5-big-ip-local-traffic-manager-ltm-reviews ) is its ability to identify compromised traffic and its capabilities in authentication. Additionally, the security aspect of it provides a significant advantage as it helps us secure our data, which is a major investment and benefit for us. Before using this system, we had difficulties in storing our data and managing the traffic that comes in and out.

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RiaanDu Preez

Senior Cyber Security Specialist Architect at Cyberlinx

A product that offers advanced bot detection capabilities and reporting features

The scalability of the product is high. I rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten. It is very easy to use the scalability features of the product, especially if the product is deployed on the cloud model, but it may be a different story if the tool is deployed on an on-premises model. The difficulty of using the scalability feature nude of the product arises when the client does not have the capacity to scale up. My company deals with businesses of all sizes. One of my company's clients who uses the solution has five members and a large e-commerce environment. There are also enterprise-sized clients who use the solution.

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Archana Heeralal

Security Engineer at Amazon

A good solution to implement web application firewall for applications

There are some lags in Signal Sciences for the web application firewalls. Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic. There is a little bit of complexity with custom rules that should be removed. Signal Sciences should add a feature called rate limiting with multiple options, wherein I can create a rate limiting based on the cookie request or the IP.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Initial setup was straightforward. We were up and running in three hours."

"We're able to do load balancing and global load balancing. When you marry those two products together, you can do a lot more. We're able to deliver our applications more securely and faster. It has improved our deliverability where we have more service across the shared data centers. We can intelligently reach all of those client connections across all of the servers and do it fairly quickly. It has helped improve our application delivery and performance."

"I've worked a little bit with iRules and it is amazing."

"Secure and scalable traffic management solution for applications. Good for bigger environments."

"It offers features Kemp doesn't provide. For example, there are predefined templates for handling Office 365. You can download them for automatic configuration."

"If I were to choose one key feature in particular, perhaps it would be the iRule feature. It’s a really versatile tool."

"The scalability of the solution depends on the sizing of the network. Generally, the scalability is quite good."

"Good application firewall."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pros

"The stability of the product is good since I haven't had any problems with the solution."

"I am impressed with the product's automatic bot mechanism. It also gives us the control to create our own custom bot rules."

"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."

"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."

Cons

"F5 has another solution to load balance servers on the cloud, which they got after the purchase of NGINX. It is deployed as Kubernetes or something like that, but the problem now is that they have two solutions for two situations. They should make F5 deployable on the cloud."

"Not everything is intuitive."

"The user interface could be improved in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager."

"Implementing whitepapers with a lot more applications could easily be added."

"The initial setup can take a long time."

"A more intuitive interface would be helpful."

"Reporting could be improved and configuration made easier."

"The web interface could be better."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) cons

"The tool needs to include artificial intelligence and machine learning. It also needs to improve profiling."

"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."

"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."

"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."

"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BIG-IP LTM is considered a premium product, so it's quite expensive and isn't affordable for all customers."

"F5 is expensive."

"Compared to using open-source products, the prices are not cheap."

"You can buy it on a yearly basis, or you can go for a subscription. For on-premise boxes, it is just the RMA."

"This is a high-priced tool. We pay for its license yearly."

"I am a fan of using AWS natively. It is much cheaper."

"It is a bit expensive product. Kemp Loadmaster is much cheaper than F5. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It can be for one year or three years."

"The solution is more expensive than one of its competitors."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pricing and cost advice

"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 tool's pricing is good."

"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."

"The product has an affordable cost."

"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

33%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Media Company

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

18%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP?

The price needs improvement as it is quite costly.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for F5 BIG-IP?

We're using F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) ( /products/f5-big-ip-local-traffic-manager-ltm-reviews ) for our a...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?

The solution is robust and reliable.

See all answers

What do you like most about Imperva Bot Management?

The stability of the product is good since I haven't had any problems with the solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Imperva Bot Management?

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 pric...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Imperva Bot Management?

At the moment, I am okay with the product. I haven't found something that needs to be improved yet. I am not physical...

See all answers

What do you like most about Signal Sciences?

The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?

The pricing is 50% less than Akamai.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?

Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiADC vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 20% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

NetScaler vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

HAProxy vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

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DataDome vs Imperva Bot Management

Compared 45% of the time

Cloudflare vs Imperva Bot Management

Compared 31% of the time

F5 Shape Security vs Imperva Bot Management

Compared 24% of the time

More Imperva Bot Management Competitors

Cloudflare vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 25% of the time

AWS WAF vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 18% of the time

Azure Front Door vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 13% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 12% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)

Compared 10% of the time

More The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

April 2025

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report

Download F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) product report

Buyer's Guide

Bot Management

March 2025

Download Imperva Bot Management product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) report

Download The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) product report

Also Known As

F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP

Distil Networks, Distil Bot Detection and Mitigation

Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP

Overview

F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.

BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

Distil Networks is the first easy and accurate way to identify and police malicious website traffic, blocking 99.9% of bad bots without impacting legitimate users. Only 41% of web traffic originates from humans, so it’s imperative to be able to detect and block automated attacks. Bots are the key culprits behind web scraping, online fraud, web application security breaches, content spam, digital ad fraud, and downtime. Distil Networks is purpose built to defeat bad bots that circumvent traditional web application defenses like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). Distil makes your web applications more secure with API security, real-time threat intelligence, a 24/7 security operations center, and complete visibility and control over human, good bot, and bad bot traffic.

Imperva

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) provides web application and API protection, RASP, rate limiting, bot protection and DDoS purpose built to eliminate the challenges of legacy WAF.

Fastly

Sample Customers

Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.

StubHub, Yelp, Glassdoor, DowJones, The Wall Street Journal, Whitepages, CrunchBase, AOL, Staples, Wayfair, EasyJet, Autotrader, Skyscanner, Orbitz, and Conde Nast, Amadeus, and Thomson Reuters, just to name a few.

Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

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