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

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva Application Security Platform comparison

Sponsored
 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Cloudflare users experienced increased performance, security, and cost-effectiveness, leading to improved loyalty and revenue despite difficult ROI calculations.
Sentiment score
6.6
Fortinet FortiWeb offers cost-effective security, reducing expenses by up to 80%, enhancing reliability, and mitigating cyber threats.
Sentiment score
6.3
Users report Imperva's significant ROI, citing cost recovery, DDoS protection, reduced cloud bills, and improved efficiency and compliance.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
They know how much money they are losing while the system is down, so by increasing the possibility of not having a down website or web application, return on investment can be calculated easily.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Cloudflare's customer service is quick, but technical support feedback is mixed, with improvement needed in responsiveness and detailed assistance.
Sentiment score
6.7
Fortinet FortiWeb's support is responsive and competent, though users note room for improvement in expertise and response times.
Sentiment score
7.2
Imperva's customer service is praised for expertise but criticized for inconsistency, with recent improvements noted by some users.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
The expertise of engineers varies across different time zones, affecting the effectiveness of the support provided, especially during our daytime.
they provide very nice technical support and are responsive.
I would rate the technical support of Imperva DDoS as ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Users praise Cloudflare for seamless scalability, effective traffic management, easy upgrades, and robust global infrastructure without disruptions.
Sentiment score
7.1
Fortinet FortiWeb is scalable but limited in hardware upgrades; virtual machines offer more adaptability for various needs.
Sentiment score
7.9
Imperva Application Security Platform offers strong scalability and reliability, though costs and on-premises flexibility may present challenges.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
99% of customers are using the cloud version of Imperva DDoS protection, so they just purchase the new license and scale as needed.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare is highly rated for stability and uptime, with few past issues, especially on higher-tier plans.
Sentiment score
7.8
Fortinet FortiWeb is generally reliable, with minimal stability issues, although some users face occasional configuration or version challenges.
Sentiment score
7.8
Users find Imperva Application Security Platform reliable and stable, rating its stability highly despite occasional minor issues.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
We have not faced any significant issues during deployments.
The stability of Imperva DDoS is very good, as it seems they have a lot of servers around the world.
 

Room For Improvement

Enhancements needed in Cloudflare: analytics, CDN latency, API integration, user support, DNS, pricing, documentation, server coverage, WAF, and cache.
Fortinet FortiWeb needs improvements in upgrades, support, threat intelligence, user interface, cloud integration, reporting, stability, and load balancing.
Imperva needs UI improvements, competitive pricing, better integration, real-time analytics, and enhanced support for efficiency and transparency.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
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.
Fine-tuning is a room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb.
The cloud-based security service of Fortinet FortiWeb could be enhanced to match the level of providers like Cloudflare.
Maybe Imperva DDoS could use endpoints to get information about the attacks before they commence from the endpoint level or establish cooperation with endpoint vendors to share this information.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare offers scalable pricing, from free to enterprise plans, providing significant value especially for mid-sized companies.
Fortinet FortiWeb provides flexible pricing and licensing, appealing to enterprises for cost-effectiveness despite some users noting variable costs.
The Imperva platform's pricing is competitive with advanced features, ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 annually and no setup costs.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive.
For VM machines, the price increases based on CPU configurations of 2, 4, or 8 CPUs.
Most security products charge less at the time of purchase because of competition, but when we go to renewals, the prices become very high.
Fortinet FortiWeb is cost-effective compared to solutions like F5.
I would rate the pricing of Imperva DDoS as five, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare enhances performance and security with CDN caching, DDoS protection, and an easy-to-use dashboard, benefiting many users.
Fortinet FortiWeb provides advanced security features and seamless integration, offering cost-effective, robust protection and easy deployment for enterprises.
Imperva's platform offers robust security features, user-friendly integration, real-time analytics, and scalability for diverse enterprise protection needs.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
Fortinet FortiWeb has positively impacted my organization because most of our servers and applications are secure from hackers and other security threats.
The machine learning-based threat detection is significant, as it uses a learning method that eases the configuration burden, making it very useful.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th)
Imperva Application Securit...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
133
Ranking in other categories
CDN (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Bot Management (1st), API Security (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

HA
Has helped manage client domains with streamlined access control and threat visibility
I don't know what areas could be improved with Cloudflare WAF; Cloudflare is constantly improving and adding features to their feature set. They're doing a good job, and as far as DNS and support for any domains that I create or my clients create, it's mandatory for me to make sure that they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider. The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service. It doesn't pay to try to host your own website.
HameedAhmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Security threats have been reduced through seamless deployment and strong integration with other tools
I have used Fortinet FortiWeb's integration features. We have easily integrated all of the applications with the product. Most of the applications we are using are in-house built. My technical team is looking after the best features. I have not used it extensively for maybe two and a half years. I have been involved in the installation, but I am not actually using the product. I work with it from time to time but not extensively. I would assess Fortinet FortiWeb's adaptive machine learning and artificial intelligence as having new patches installed regarding artificial intelligence, but when we bought it, I think the learning feature was there. Now they have installed artificial intelligence features through patches. We have a complete portfolio of Fortinet in our organization, including FortiMail, Fortinet FortiWeb, and FortiGate, along with multi-factor authentication. All of the products are from Fortinet. Fortinet tools integrate with each other and work in conjunction. I think Fortinet FortiWeb has helped us meet regulatory compliance because we are not a regulatory organization, but our sister organization is regulatory. We have regulatory compliance with the International Civil Aviation Authority, whose audit teams have checked our data center and these security products, and they are satisfied with us. The question about leveraging Fortinet FortiWeb's automated policy management does not pertain to my domain because I am not so technical, but I am in a management role now. My engineer is more technical than me. I would rate this product an eight point five out of ten.
reviewer1247523 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
873,808 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
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
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 Business47
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise31
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 Fortinet FortiWeb?
The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?
The pricing for Fortinet FortiWeb varies with different models having different prices. It depends on the requirement...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
There is room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb. The team was only from FortiGate itself. They are making new firm...
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.
Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiWeb vs. Imperva Application Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
873,808 professionals have used our research since 2012.