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Fastly vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in CDN
1st
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (10th)
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
7th
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
10th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd)
Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in CDN
3rd
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
135
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd), Bot Management (1st), API Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.2%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 3.2%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 8.5%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare16.2%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.5%
Fastly3.2%
Other72.1%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
PP
Technical support engineer at Adobe
Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering
I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.
reviewer1247523 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Solution ensures website availability and proactive threat mitigation
Over the seven years, the most valuable features of Imperva DDoS that I have found are related to DDoS attacks, which are a group of attacks, and not all of them can be resolved on the endpoint level before the website. Using the web firewall before the website is a common use case to protect against malicious requests to the website. I have utilized Imperva's Intelligent Traffic Filtering feature. This feature helps me understand how the attack is progressing and what is happening inside the requests to our website. It allows me to granularly grant or deny access to certain parts of our website. This helps when we know our customers and the types of requests that can be sent from them, enabling us to block some malicious requests. Imperva DDoS has User Behavior Analytics and Threat Intelligence on its board, and this helps us to be protected proactively. Imperva DDoS connects to its database of threats, storing whole information about attacks all over the world in one simple engine. Everyone can use this feature, which can connect to this engine and get information about what is going on at the world level. That is the way to be protected at the company's level. The integration capabilities of Imperva DDoS are very easy and simple. We can run it in 2 hours.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"In my opinion, CloudFlare is one of the best CDN networks I have ever used."
"The UI is good."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"CloudFlare provides an answer to a variety of issues, so it gives you very high value for your money."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."
"The ease of testing Incapsula and then implementing it into production is one of the most remarkable product experiences in my IT career."
"We use Imperva DDoS to stop DDoS attacks and reduce the amount of unwanted queries against web services or web scraping."
"The solution can scale."
"Hands down, the WAF is the most valuable feature; being able to identify, block, whitelist or blacklist as needed, are all valuable."
"With acquisition of a license to use the product, we received the ability to standardize database scanning and data protection across the enterprise around one product."
"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."
"It is a stable solution."
"The stability of the product is good since I haven't had any problems with the solution."
 

Cons

"I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"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."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"The installation was complex until I learned what I had to learn."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."
"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."
"Support is not that great."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"I see some areas for improvement in Imperva Application Security Platform, especially regarding price."
"I am not sure if this application has a policy where you can create your custom policy and run it as our firewall. We should have some ability to also create some custom policy, then run it as a firewall."
"They once terminated a free account without warning, resulting in a few days downtime."
"They need to work on the customer support; in my opinion, this is their weakest point. Some of their support representatives really have no idea how their service works."
"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."
"The only disadvantage of Imperva is that it is a pretty costly solution."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is very expensive."
"Incapsula: Allow easier scripting of firewall rules."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"The tool is expensive."
"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
"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 price of Imperva Web Application Firewalls is expensive compared to others."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."
"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Expert with 51-200 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business84
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise62
 

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 needs improvement with Fastly?
I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are ...
What is your primary use case for Fastly?
I am using Fastly in the Adobe Commerce Cloud project. In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and ...
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 mana...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Imperva DDoS?
The pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Imperva DDoS are reasonable for the amount of technical capabilities provi...
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators o...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
 

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.
Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. Imperva Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.