Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Fastly vs Imperva DDoS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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

Fastly
Ranking in CDN
7th
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
18th
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Imperva DDoS
Ranking in CDN
6th
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
21st
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Fastly is 2.3%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 6.4%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

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.
DerrickAkankwasa - PeerSpot reviewer
Provide DDoS protection and better security at effective rate
It is expanding its number of data centers for scrubbing traffic. Currently, there is only one POP for cleaning in South Africa. They might add another POP in North Africa, possibly in Nigeria or Egypt. Latency concerns customers, especially in regions like East and West Africa, where traffic has to travel to South Africa before returning. Increasing the number of POPs across the continent would help address these latency issues and improve overall service. While the platform is already quite strong, there’s always room for improvement, especially in keeping up with emerging trends and new types of attacks. Enhancing security capabilities could be beneficial. Integrating more advanced AI features could significantly improve its effectiveness and help customers leverage these tools more effectively. It would be great to see more focus on AI integration to handle and analyze data more efficiently.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"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."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"The most valuable features are DDoS protection."
"I like the user-friendly interface."
"The most valuable feature of Imperva DDoS is to make our website available for our customers' requests 24 hours a day."
"It is an effective threat mitigation tool."
"The solution has a very good interface."
"Real-time monitoring is also a great tool, as you may watch several parameters in real time."
"​Technical support provides good, quick responses."
"The technical support is excellent."
 

Cons

"Support is not that great."
"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."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"I would like to have support for SSL management and secure DNS."
"I miss being able to integrate the dashboard with other BI tools we are using. We have to export and import data to be able to present it, and doing so is a lot of work."
"Its price could be improved. It is quite expensive. It will be good if we could export the configuration. Currently, to control the configuration, we need to go to each website, which is not very convenient."
"Imperva always needs to adjust to new versions of cyber attacks, it needs to be faster, improve the resiliency of the software of the solution."
"The log analytics interface within Incapsula isn't really good. For example, if you have to get all logs from there, it's a very cumbersome process."
"The solution should integrate with something that looks at continuous security management."
"It needs to be improved every time there are new attacks."
"Users would benefit from better documentation. There is official documentation, but sometimes we need more detail. We have some use cases that are not so run of the mill. It would be great if there was a knowledge base that we could go to for more answers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"It is an expensive solution."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"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."
"It is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"It is expensive."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.
What needs improvement with Fastly?
What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is ve...
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 is rated a ten on a scale where ten is very expensive. The solution is only cloud-based and does not provide on-premises services.
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive. Additionally, support response times for emails can sometimes be delayed, which is an area that could use improvement.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Imperva Incapsula
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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 DDoS and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.