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Imperva Application Security Platform vs R&S Web Application Firewall (DenyAll) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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 Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Imperva Application Securit...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
135
Ranking in other categories
CDN (3rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Bot Management (1st), API Security (2nd)
R&S Web Application Firewal...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
45th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.5
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Application Security Platform is 8.1%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of R&S Web Application Firewall (DenyAll) is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Imperva Application Security Platform8.1%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall5.4%
R&S Web Application Firewall (DenyAll)0.3%
Other86.2%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Q&A Highlights

PM
Sales Director with 51-200 employees
Aug 31, 2021
 

Featured Reviews

DB
CTO at PlayNirvana
Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.
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.
SS
General Manager at 3R Technologie
Geo-localization and IP reputation help to keep our clients secure and more available
The area that should be improved is licensing. When using an active/passive cluster, we have to pay 70% of the master appliance and license for the passive server that does not work. Since we know that only one server works at a time, we should pay only one license for the appliances and for the support as well. In my opinion, this has to be improved. If possible, the client software should be a web application instead of downloading software for the management. This can avoid login problems when they update or patch.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."
"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"This implementation helped our organization a lot in handling web attacks by hackers and other malicious intruders."
"There are some features that are configured by default, so even without doing much, it can still provide a level of protection."
"The solution is very scalable. It is one of the most important features. You can also expand resources and features as well."
"The technical support is excellent."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable features are DDoS protection."
"Imperva is a Gartner leader, so its scalability, performance, and features are excellent."
"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."
"The three most valuable features that I noticed are the geo-localization of the user, the IP reputation, and the compartmental analysis."
 

Cons

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"Sometimes, it takes a bit of time for the technical staff of the solution to get back to our company with a resolution for our problems."
"I am not sure if this application has a policy where you can create your custom policy and run it as our firewall."
"Certificate management could be improved."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the API integration. It was complex for us. Additionally, The onboarding could be better."
"They guarantee to fix your problem within 15 minutes, but they don’t always keep their word."
"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."
"The cost could be lower; our end clients need to have a high budget to purchase this solution."
"It would be nice to have more security control over mobile applications so I would suggest adding more mobile security features. It would also be beneficial to see improvements in regards to interface bandwidth performance, CPU time, and RAM size. Learning capability of the device is quite weak."
"The area that should be improved is licensing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not too pricey."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The solution is expensive."
"There is a license or subscription renewal that our customers pay."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"There are some licenses that you have to buy to use some features. Its price could be better. Price is always important because, at the end of the day, customers have a budget. If you can meet the budget, you can sell, and if you don't, you cannot sell."
"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."
"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
"The tool is expensive."
"It is expensive."
Information not available
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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…
 

Answers from the Community

PM
Sales Director with 51-200 employees
Aug 31, 2021
Aug 31, 2021
Imperva is a strong choice, given their security focus and ongoing R&D into the product in areas such as bot management.
2 out of 5 answers
RF
Resp. Area de Segurança at REN
May 19, 2020
We have had a very good experience with FortiWeb.
JD
Principal Analyst at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
May 20, 2020
Imperva is a strong choice, given their security focus and ongoing R&D into the product in areas such as bot management.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business84
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise62
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...
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 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...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
Imperva Bot Management, Imperva Web Application Firewall, Imperva API Security
Rohde & Schwarz Web Application Firewall, R&S WAF, DenyAll Web Application Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.