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

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks 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
6.3
Users report Imperva's significant ROI, citing cost recovery, DDoS protection, reduced cloud bills, and improved efficiency and compliance.
Sentiment score
7.0
Prisma Cloud enhances security, saves time, improves compliance, and reduces costs, although exact financial benefits are hard to quantify.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
Product Manager at Infozion
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
Owner at Hga consulting
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.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
It eliminates the need for additional hardware, making it a financially and technically sound investment.
Partner at Quasys
Reputation and data security are the two most important things to a financial institution.
Works at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees
We may have prevented a security breach with remediation of the findings.
Security Solutions Architect - Cloud Security Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
 

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
7.2
Imperva's customer service is praised for expertise but criticized for inconsistency, with recent improvements noted by some users.
Sentiment score
7.0
Prisma Cloud's customer service is praised for expertise but criticized for inconsistent response times and regional support variations.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
General Manager at bKash Limited
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
Owner at Hga consulting
I would rate the technical support of Imperva DDoS as ten.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
They can respond with technical documentation or pass on the case to the next level because it requires the development of a new feature or changing a feature due to a bug.
Technical Lead at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Anywhere we raise a tech case, they revert back within an hour.
Cloud Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
The forum articles are also well-maintained and provide a massive footprint of information.
Solution Manager at Cyberlinx
 

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
7.9
Imperva Application Security Platform offers strong scalability and reliability, though costs and on-premises flexibility may present challenges.
Sentiment score
7.6
Prisma Cloud offers scalable solutions, efficiently managing deployments, despite occasional operational complexities and licensing influences on scalability perception.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
Independent Consultant at Unaikui
99% of customers are using the cloud version of Imperva DDoS protection, so they just purchase the new license and scale as needed.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
We are growing extremely quickly, and Prisma Cloud provides all the required services without any need for us to do anything to scale.
Platform Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Scalability is a strong aspect; we have never experienced issues with it.
IT engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
Technology Specialist - Cloud Security at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

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
Users find Imperva Application Security Platform reliable and stable, rating its stability highly despite occasional minor issues.
Sentiment score
8.0
Prisma Cloud is praised for high stability, though minor disruptions and data retrieval challenges occur in complex environments.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
General Manager at bKash Limited
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
Independent Consultant at Unaikui
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
The stability of Imperva DDoS is very good, as it seems they have a lot of servers around the world.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
Cloud Security Engineer (Team lead) at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Prisma Cloud has excellent stability.
Solution Manager at Cyberlinx
It provides excellent stability capabilities.
IT engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Enhancements needed in Cloudflare: analytics, CDN latency, API integration, user support, DNS, pricing, documentation, server coverage, WAF, and cache.
Imperva needs UI improvements, competitive pricing, better integration, real-time analytics, and enhanced support for efficiency and transparency.
Prisma Cloud requires enhanced documentation, user interface, automation, integration features, pricing, support, updates, and improved access and monitoring.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
General Manager at bKash Limited
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Managed Services Manager at Adapture Technology Group
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.
Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Integrated Technology Solution Group (ITSG)
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.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
From a developer's perspective, especially for organizations like banks developing their applications, ensuring API security before deploying them to the cloud is crucial.
Solution Manager at Cyberlinx
Prisma Cloud is an excellent tool.
Technical Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We could have deployed the runtime monitoring with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, but within our organization at our company, it was very difficult to find who would be the owner for the alerts.
Cyber Security Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare offers scalable pricing, from free to enterprise plans, providing significant value especially for mid-sized companies.
The Imperva platform's pricing is competitive with advanced features, ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 annually and no setup costs.
Prisma Cloud offers comprehensive features and robust security but presents challenges with its complex and potentially expensive licensing model.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
Product Manager at Infozion
I find it to be cheap.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive.
General Manager at bKash Limited
I would rate the pricing of Imperva DDoS as five, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
The cost was not on the higher side.
Technical Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Typically, the additional cost for professional services to help with implementation ranges from 15 to 20 percent of the license cost.
Solution Manager at Cyberlinx
If you are using a single tool like Prisma Cloud, with a single license, you can monitor all environments, such as Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, and Oracle Cloud.
Cloud Security Delivery Associate Manager at Accenture
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare enhances performance and security with CDN caching, DDoS protection, and an easy-to-use dashboard, benefiting many users.
Imperva's platform offers robust security features, user-friendly integration, real-time analytics, and scalability for diverse enterprise protection needs.
Prisma Cloud enhances multi-cloud security with automated forensics, compliance monitoring, and integration in CI/CD pipelines for threat prevention.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Integrated Technology Solution Group (ITSG)
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
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.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
I can scan and assess weaknesses and have continuous monitoring and fixing with automation of remediation.
Senior Manager ICT & at Bangalore International Airport Limited
Prisma Cloud excels by offering a comprehensive solution within a single dashboard. This unified approach addresses all our requirements, making it the most advantageous aspect of this tool.
IT engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
There is a wide range of integrations, and the compatibility with various cloud providers is very useful.
Technical Director at Cascade Solutions
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
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) (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Bot Management (1st), API Security (2nd)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (8th), Container Security (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

HA
Owner at Hga consulting
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.
reviewer1247523 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
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.
reviewer2776578 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Image scanning has supported consistent security practices during cloud deployment
On a scale of ten, we would say people are happy with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for the part we use. People are okay with it. We probably would give an eight. We don't give ten because if we don't use the other parts of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, it's because it was difficult to implement from an operational point of view. We could have deployed the runtime monitoring with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, but within our organization at our company, it was very difficult to find who would be the owner for the alerts. People have other tools and in the end, we don't use the full capabilities of a product that we pay for. It's partially related to the difficulty to integrate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks runtime in our company's support process. We don't use the real-time monitoring part of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. We don't know about the automated remediation feature of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
876,331 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Expert with 51-200 employees
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%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
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 Business83
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise61
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise56
 

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 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...
What is your primary use case for Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks?
Prisma Cloud helps support DevSecOps methodologies, making those responsibilities easier to manage.
What Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform do you recommend?
We like Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, since it offers us incredible visibility into our entire cloud system. We...
What do you think of Aqua Security vs Prisma Cloud?
Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very valu...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
 

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.
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva Application Security Platform vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
876,331 professionals have used our research since 2012.