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Fortinet FortiDDoS 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 Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Fortinet FortiDDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Imperva Application Securit...
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
CDN (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th), Bot Management (2nd), API Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.3%, up from 17.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiDDoS is 2.6%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 7.3%, down from 8.4% 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 (%)
Cloudflare18.3%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.3%
Fortinet FortiDDoS2.6%
Other71.8%
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.
Yazan Omar - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-use tool with great GUI
The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.
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

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"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 is the web application firewall."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."
"The equipment works very well, and I have not encountered any issues with it."
"This solution can protect Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 attacks of applications for us."
"The solution already has security profiles and it can protect from DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks."
"It allows me to see all the traffic on my network."
"The solution is very user-friendly and very easy to use."
"The protection resources and the support are valuable features of the solution."
"It is a user-friendly product in terms of monitoring and updating policies."
"Among its key features: Detects and mitigates DDoS attacks at L3 to L7; negligible to zero false-positives; Generates and sends reports without the need for an expensive third-party solution."
"Simplifies putting everything in code."
"The solution is cloud-based and offers us good uptime. It has combined web and API security. Therefore, with one license, you access both application security and also API security."
"The solution integrates seamlessly with other tools and has a good alert mechanism."
"DDoS protection and WAF are the most valuable features. It is easy to deploy a service. It is easy and quick to deploy to a new website."
"One good thing about Imperva Web Application Firewall is it can be on the cloud and also it can be on-premise."
"The tool's profiling feature maps all the web application directories and related components on the profile directory. It has improved the security of my client's website applications."
"It's very pretty easy to onboard the URL."
"The solution has been quite stable. I have not seen any bugs at all."
 

Cons

"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."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"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's console should be made more user-friendly."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"The solution can be a little more user-friendly and it can be more affordable."
"There aren't really any aspects of the solution we are unhappy with. It's been a positive experience overall."
"The web interface could be much better."
"The tool needs to focus more on the area of application traffic management, where it currently has some shortcomings."
"Alerts and reporting features must be improved."
"I find that there have been issues in the past year with the solution hanging. It freezes often."
"The main improvement would be to change the firewall model, however, currently, everything is fixed and working well."
"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."
"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."
"Analytics in the area of risk need to be improved to supply more information to the users for creating better environments."
"They recently separated the WAF and the DAM management gateways in order for each of these to be managed from different areas, so I believe it now requires additional investments for what was previously a single complete solution."
"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."
"The tool's UI is complicated. It would be best to have a more accessible UI dashboard to make the job easier."
"Support is one thing I wish Imperva could improve."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a good system, but we found that the visibility of the diverse-path server, e.g. where the traffic is coming from, the different IPs, etc., needs improvement."
 

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."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"It's quite pricey."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"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."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall's pricing is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"The tool is expensive."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
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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%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
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 Business10
Large Enterprise6
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.
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would...
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?
The product's initial setup phase was really easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?
Fortinet FortiDDoS offers lower costs compared to other solutions. The licensing costs are annually renewed.
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
Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos
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.
Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiDDoS vs. Imperva Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,846 professionals have used our research since 2012.