F5 Silverline Managed Services vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

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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:

Categories and Ranking

F5 Silverline Managed Services

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

23rd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (14th)

Imperva Web Application Fir...

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

7th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 1.2%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Web Application Firewall is 5.8%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Archana Heeralal

Security Engineer at Amazon

A reasonably priced product with a good UI, but the navigation is difficult, and the support team takes a long time to respond

Since we use the solution’s cloud, the product has more control over the back end. The customer will not have control. It is part of the product’s feature. When we get more complex requirements or if we want to write more complex tools, the support team will have the visibility to write them because they have control. The navigation is difficult to use. The navigation should be improved. Other products are quite straightforward. If I try to implement a new application and do an onboarding, it is not very easy. We must go to one feature, inside which there will be more features. It should be simplified, and a menu should be provided.

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Mitesh D Patel

Senior Technical Consultant- Cyber Security at Ivalue Infosolution

Effectively defends against threats like cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and others

It does bring value. For example, consider a BFSI customer. Their application is critical and represents their brand. Without a WAF, an attack could take their application down, harming their reputation. It leads to hampering the customer's workflow. With an Imperva WAF, they protect against attacks like DDoS or SQL injection, ensuring their application remains available and customers are happy. That's the main benefit for both the customer and the organization. The impact depends on the customer's use case. If their business primarily operates online, a CDN is beneficial for traffic optimization. Moreover, the integration options depend on the specific use case of our customers. Generally, integration capabilities are good with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) parts.

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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

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is its cloud-native functionality and the high level of protection it provides."

"The most valuable feature is flexibility."

"Its flexibility is the most valuable because it is a managed service. The good part is that you don't need to set it up. It just needs DNS routing, which is the easiest thing. Our client had Akamai for certain websites because they were using CDN features. They had NetScaler on the internal zone, F5 AWAFs on the data centers, and no WAF at all in the cloud. One of the main activities of the project was to move all these policies into a single WAF so that we could control and use that as a choke point. That exercise itself was very easy because it was a managed service and F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall does that for you. That's the best thing about F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall. It is easy to apply policies on-premises. If you have AWAF on-premises and you want to replicate some policies on F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, other than the policies that it applies by itself, it is easy because you have a team that supports it. F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works perfectly fine. It pretty much does everything that an Advanced WAF on-premises should do."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"F5 Silverline offers load balancing, flexibility, and reliability."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."

"Most vendors fulfill the requirements for standard DDoS protection, but F5 Silverline Managed Services has a better understanding of defending web applications like HTTP and can mitigate more bot activity than any other vendor."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

"Very intuitive and granular configuration - It does not require much time, or advanced knowledge, for configuration and maintenance."

"The most valuable feature of Imperva, in addition to its strong knowledge base, is its effective protection for web applications."

"The solution can be configured in just a couple of minutes."

"Learning mode and custom policies are helpful features."

"It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications."

"The solution is stable."

"The valuable features of Imperva WAF include its effective security breach prevention through automatically updating rules."

"Configuration for different application sources is most valuable. We can segregate the traffic that an application is carrying and identify the sizing in Imperva."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

"Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles, optimization deployments, and compression profiles for better performance."

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by adding features that Palo Alto has."

"Sometimes tech support can be slow. They take more time assigning engineers to complex issues, however, they resolve the issues by joining me to fix them."

"Automating processes could enhance F5 Silverline Managed Services."

"We need to have support for cloud protection, which is not offered by this solution."

"The product could be improved on the global load and the integration with the other solution like Cisco and Dell. As a representor of the operation, we prefer to have one platform which can accommodate all type of integration. We are also looking for more improvements in the security policy configuration."

"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

"It would be useful if the solution used more intelligence in attack protection. For example, firewalls are to be dependent on the configuration, but if they could have some data science around it the solution would be even better. The profiling of the traffic, and making decisions surrounding that should be intelligence-based, instead of being based on the configuration of the firewall itself."

"I would like the solution to improve its support response time."

"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."

"I think that better bot protection is needed in this solution."

"The only disadvantage of Imperva is that it is a pretty costly solution."

"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."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is very expensive."

"An improvement for Imperva WAF would be to reduce the number of false positives and create more strong use cases based on AI/ML or behavioral analytics."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

"The tool is expensive."

"There are a couple of different licensing models."

"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."

"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."

"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the price."

"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."

"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.

What do you like most about F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The initial setup is straightforward.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The solution is quite reasonably priced, with costs being lower in comparison to competitors. On a scale where ten is very expensive, I would rate the pricing as three. It offers cost savings and i...

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

My recommendation is Imperva.

DDoS solutions: Any other solutions to consider aside from Radware DDoS Protection Service and F5 Silverline DDoS Protection?

You can have a look to Imperva Cloud WAF, the anti-DDoS mitigation is under 1s and works very well. I observed a lot of DDoS attacks that were well managed (even not seen by the customer) by Imperv...

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 management.

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AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

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Product Reports

F5 Silverline Managed Services

Download F5 Silverline Managed Services product report

Imperva Web Application Firewall

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

No data available

Overview

F5's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.

Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.

Imperva Web Application Firewall is a versatile solution that protects web applications and databases from various attacks, including DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks. It offers data security, availability, and access control and can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud.

The solution has good security against web attacks and offers advanced bot protection, API security, and mitigation features. Imperva WAF is easy to configure and deploy; it has good customer service and an excellent user interface.

Imperva

Sample Customers

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall