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Fortinet FortiWeb vs Imperva DDoS vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiWeb is 8.2%, up from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 2.0%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Web Application Firewall is 5.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Kacem CHAMMALI - PeerSpot reviewer
Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb
The xFF, or X-Forwarded-For feature, IP reputation, and protected hostname. We can block access using the IP address, so no one can connect to our web server or website using the real IP. They need to use the FQDN instead. Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb and the option to protect the hostname. All traffic passes through FortiWeb. Machine learning capabilities in FortiWeb: I don't use machine learning all the time. In the initial phase of FortiWeb deployment, we use the learning process to detect the traffic passing through FortiGate to our website.
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.
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

"The valuable feature of Fortinet FortiWeb vulnerability scanner"
"We find that it is quite stable and reliable."
"L-7 protection makes possible to protect legacy/not up-to-date servers/applications without changing the application code."
"Banks have to be compliant with PCI and other things, and FortiWeb is absolutely amazing in terms of providing these reports. Otherwise, they will have to spend a lot of time on them."
"It's stable and works efficiently against OWASP Top 10 attacks."
"The customers are very happy with this solution because of two things. First, the IPS integration with a web application is very tightly done on Fortinet. Second, the ease of use is there. The management interface or the GUI interface is very easy to use, configure, and manage. These are the two main valuable features. It supports integration with other Fortinet products. It also integrates very well with the firewall and sandboxing technology. They already have enough integration with different technologies. They have got a complete tech intelligence view of the whole product."
"The policies and the filtering are the most valuable features, especially traffic, URL, and application filtering. The solution is excellent at detecting vulnerabilities."
"It's the extra security that is the most valuable feature. You have insight into your traffic. There are some great insights into what utilities hackers are trying to exploit. It blocks a lot of stuff from the internet."
"It fits our requirements, as well as our budget."
"The dashboard is good and user-friendly."
"Integration with IBM AS/400 and Db2 is okay."
"The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers."
"The three-second service level agreement is already better than the competition."
"Incapsula takes care of the CDN infrastructure and bandwidth volume, providing several enterprise "load balancing" features."
"It blocks all types of attacks."
"The most valuable features are DDoS protection."
"The WAF itself has been very valuable to me because it has such a complete range of features. Another reason why I like it is because it also takes care of the total overview of the traffic over the network."
"Imperva monitors all traffic, even customer access, to the web application. Then, Imperva uses features like signatures to identify attacks like cross-site scripting or SQL injection."
"One good thing about Imperva Web Application Firewall is it can be on the cloud and also it can be on-premise."
"There are many features. There is ease of deployment. You can deploy the Imperva Web Application Firewall in two to three minutes. After that, you have to set the policies. For setting policies, you have toggle buttons. You can turn something on or off."
"Imperva is a Gartner leader, so its scalability, performance, and features are excellent."
"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."
"I am impressed with the product's scalability, availability, easy management, and security. We were able to integrate the product with Azure and Sentinel."
"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."
 

Cons

"We have had problems with deployments where we've had to contact technical support to resolve them."
"For advanced users, it would be really useful to have access and the ability to manipulate packets. If we can access and manipulate the contents of packets, even encrypted packets... that would be powerful. Since we're looking at packets arriving at our network, we would have the private key to access those packets and their information."
"The automation piece can be improved. Although they say it can be automated very well, there is still manual work. Its usability should be improved in terms of automation because we want to build an infrastructure with code, but you can't do that easily with this solution. If they can give us APIs in the firewalls that we can tap into, it would be perfect."
"A better load balancer is needed when multiple servers are used for the same website."
"​Their support needs improvement."
"Their documentation is fairly complete, but it's sometimes a little bit difficult to search for exactly what you're looking for to resolve an issue. There have been times when we've gone to try to search for areas that we needed to get information on, and it has not always been extremely clear exactly how a particular thing needs to be set up."
"Fortinet FortiWeb is not scalable. You'll need more budget to change the hardware."
"Fortinet's customer support needs improvement. The expertise of engineers varies across different time zones, affecting the effectiveness of the support provided, especially during our daytime."
"Analytics in the area of risk need to be improved to supply more information to the users for creating better environments."
"There’s nothing that’s missing in terms of features."
"The weakest point of Imperva is their first level of support, which should be improved. They should also improve the access and security logs viewing directly on the portal. I would like to see better access and security logs through the portal and not only through a SIM solution. Currently, if you want to explore your access and security logs from Imperva, you need a SIM tool or a SIM infrastructure on your side to do it. You can't do it manually or directly through the portal, which is a big problem for us. I had a call yesterday with Imperva for the roadmap, and I just told them this. They agreed that this is an improvement point from their side."
"I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators of compromise."
"The rules surrounding the making of web applications could be improved."
"We would like them to hire people in Sweden because it's quite hard when people are sitting in the UK or Belgium because some of the customers really want them to be local."
"Some maintenance must be performed by our IT team."
"We had an issue when securing the web applications for DDoS protection."
"I loved the approach of the cloud. The cloud has a lot of new features, like advanced web protection and DDoS protection. If those could also be on-boarded onto the on-prem versions, that would be ideal. They need to pay attention to both deployment options and not just favor one."
"The support for the on-premises version needs improvement."
"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."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the console by making it easier to use."
"I would like the solution to improve its support response time."
"An improvement for Imperva WAF would be to reduce the number of false positives and create more strong use cases based on AI/ML or behavioral analytics."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the API integration. It was complex for us. Additionally, The onboarding could be better."
"They can provide an option to create reports, automatically import the entire report, and create rules again. In a real-life crisis, it would be helpful to be able to import a report and generate security rules from that report. I should be able to create a simple query and import the reports automatically. It can maybe also tell us the format of the report."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a ten out of ten."
"The price is competitive."
"Previously, for each project, the cost was $800 to $1,000 per application. Now, it's $100 to $120. For some of the applications, there is a 90% reduction, and for some of the applications, there is a 50% reduction. We're paying only $500 to $600."
"All our Fortinet pricing is bundled together for different products, like FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiWeb. FortiWeb, by itself, is probably around $2,500 to $3,500."
"It is fine now. We had to earlier negotiate the price."
"It is not a cheap product. It is not like a Linux or a Genex that you can deploy. It is a hardware appliance, and it is built for a specific reason and reliability. It is an enterprise-class solution. You wouldn't find an SMB investing in something like this."
"Cheaper than others."
"The pricing is in the middle. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten. It feels like a justified cost for the features."
"The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay."
"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"It is expensive."
"The solution's price is high for small companies."
"There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."
"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."
"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall's pricing is expensive."
"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
"The tool is expensive."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the 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
Educational Organization
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
Fortinet FortiWeb is cost-effective compared to solutions like F5. It offers strong performance for the price, provid...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
The cloud-based security service of Fortinet FortiWeb could be enhanced to match the level of providers like Cloudfla...
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...
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators o...
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 hav...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Imperva Incapsula
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5, Microsoft and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: June 2025.
860,825 professionals have used our research since 2012.