Fastly vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

Fastly and Imperva are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Fastly is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.3, while Imperva is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.8. Fastly holds a 1.5% mindshare in WAF, compared to Imperva’s 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Fastly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Imperva users who would recommend it.

Fastly

Read 7 Fastly reviews

896 Views
543 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Imperva Web Application Fir...

Read 52 Imperva Web Application Firewall reviews

4,789 Views
2,294 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Fastly

Imperva Web Application Fir...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and Imperva Web Application Firewall are competing in the web application security space. Imperva may have the upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set, despite Fastly's stronger support and favorable pricing.

Features: Fastly offers real-time content delivery, extensive integration capabilities, and reliable security features. Imperva Web Application Firewall provides advanced security protocols, threat intelligence, and automated policy optimization, making it a stronger choice for security-oriented needs.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could enhance its zero-trust solutions, expand its CDN configuration flexibility, and improve its security-specific features. Imperva could simplify its deployment process, reduce its initial setup cost, and improve the user experience of its interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly provides straightforward deployment with strong support channels, making integration quick. Imperva's deployment is more complex due to its extensive features but offers detailed documentation and professional services.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly is praised for cost-effective setup and transparent pricing, offering good ROI for scalable needs. Imperva, though more expensive initially, justifies its cost with enhanced security, promising strong ROI for security prioritization.

To learn more, read our detailed Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

June 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 856,873 peers since 2012

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 Web Application Firewall (WAF)

18th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (12th)

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 Fastly is 1.5%, up from 1.3% 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

Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"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."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"The compliance is the most valuable aspect."

"It works right out of the box once you integrate the application."

"The configurability of the tools and the ease of operation to be the most valuable feature of Imperva."

"The most important feature I have found to be the ease in how to do the backup and restores."

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

"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."

"The most valuable features of the Imperva Web Application Firewall are DDoS, malware, and the other malicious threat prevention it provides. Additionally, third-party integration is available. You can forward the log for further analysis."

"Learning mode and custom policies are helpful features."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

"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."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"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."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"The initial setup could be simplified. Every time you have to install the solution you have to get in touch with support or somebody that can to do that for you."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is very expensive."

"If they can bring in generative AI features, that would be useful."

"I'd like the option to pick your bot protection."

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

"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by providing better features, such as improved prevention of zero-day attacks. Additionally, it should include a VR meta-analysis."

"The tool's UI is complicated. It would be best to have a more accessible UI dashboard to make the job easier."

"It is complicated to integrate the solution's on-cloud version with other platforms."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"It is an expensive solution."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."

"The solution's pricing is an issue."

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

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."

"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."

"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."

"The price of Imperva Web Application Firewalls is expensive compared to others."

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

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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

See recommendations

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

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

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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

My recommendation is Imperva.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 22% of the time

Cloudflare vs Fastly

Compared 19% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

AWS WAF vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 15% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

June 2025

Download Fastly product report

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

June 2025

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Overview

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

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

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

June 2025

Free Report: Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Fastly vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall report.

See our list of best Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors.

We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.