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Fastly vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 17, 2025

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
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
8th
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
11th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th)
Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in CDN
4th
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
133
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th), Bot Management (2nd), API Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, up from 17.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.6%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 7.4%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare18.8%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.4%
Fastly2.6%
Other71.19999999999999%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support
The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.
Mitesh D Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."
"It's very user-friendly."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"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."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"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 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."
"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."
"I am impressed with the product's automatic bot mechanism. It also gives us the control to create our own custom bot rules."
"This product is a reliable defense from malicious attacks on a network environment."
"The solution is very good at intercepting traffic before it gets to our data centers."
"Imperva is a Gartner leader, so its scalability, performance, and features are excellent."
"The setup of Imperva DDoS was easy."
"It has threat intelligence and we are using Incapsula. With threat intelligence, we can separate HTTP and HTTPS traffic. We can use Incapsula to send all the threat intelligence to the WAF."
"The bot management features are very effective, as they help filter unwanted traffic using keywords."
 

Cons

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"Eventually, things go sideways and require fixes when it would have been easier to prevent the issue initially."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"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."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"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."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"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."
"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."
"Support is not that great."
"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."
"The cost could be lower; our end clients need to have a high budget to purchase this solution."
"The tool needs to include artificial intelligence and machine learning. It also needs to improve profiling."
"The signature updates could be faster. Sometimes we have to upload signatures to the Imperva portal for checking and analysis before we can use them."
"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."
"Sometimes our web application firewall will slow down."
"The product's customization capabilities are a bit problematic, requiring support cases for backend modifications."
"The solution needs to improve Integration with third parties for their on-prem deployment models. The integration is not that good yet."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"We are using the free version."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."
"It is a very expensive solution. The price is very high. A lot of customers tell us that they would love to use Imperva more. I have some customers who have 50 websites, but they have only 10 websites on Imperva because of the price. They would love to have all their websites running through Imperva, but they can't. They have to choose the more critical websites to protect because the price is very high. It is a very good product, but it is too expensive. If you buy a plan for 20 megabytes and you don't consume all of your 20 megabytes, it is okay, but if you consume more, you are charged for the superior traffic."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay."
"It is expensive."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the price."
"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."
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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
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Retailer
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business83
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise61
 

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 Fastly?
Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...
What needs improvement with Fastly?
Fastly has POPs with huge servers across the world, so it works effectively everywhere except the mainland China regi...
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 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, setup costs, and licensing of Imperva DDoS are reasonable for the amount of technical capabilities provi...
 

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: September 2025.
872,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.