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Imperva DDoS vs Imperva SecureSphere Database Security comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Imperva DDoS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (9th)
Imperva SecureSphere Databa...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Database Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Database Security
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Syed Ubaid Ali Jafri - PeerSpot reviewer
I like the content monitoring feature which I haven't seen in other WAF solutions.
They could improve by minimizing false positive results. Although this occurs less with Imperva, we would like to see some further improvements. We have been using this product for last 1 years, it's result is very impressive. But due to the excessive load on the Web site where thousands of requests‎ are generated from legitimate users, however the request in which any sequential or specialised characters are requested would be directly blocked by impreva . Currently imperva blocks the special character request generated from the user, as I conduct a test where I am parsing the encoded html values of the same special characters to the input field, imperva bypasses these encoded values for example : ' i.e. %27 or / i.e %2F, the WAF bypasses these encoded characters. I hope that this device should have a capability to detect the pattern which is associated with Xss or Xsrf, rather then by not blocking the request which contains any special characters.
Andrew_Kampolo - PeerSpot reviewer
The fine-grained auditing available on the platform makes life easier and helps explain anything happening in your database
Imperva's most valuable features are ease of use and log correlation. I also like the ability to trace activity from the host machine to the server access, the user details, and the exact query that they executed. If a database administrator or application process executes a query on the database, people know exactly what was executed, including all the variables. For example, it will tell you how many rows they were trying to select on which table, and you get the OS information, network details, IPs, and the user. That fine-grained auditing available on the platform makes life easier and helps explain anything happening in your database.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The UI is good."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"It's very user-friendly."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"They're quite easy to install and quite easy to set up. Clients really like that. Especially when you're dealing with the cloud, it's really easy."
"We have peace of mind that nobody will use malware on us or try to hack our website."
"It fits our requirements, as well as our budget."
"Provides Anti-DDoS protection, as well as other protections like SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and antiscanner. These types of protection are valuable to the business due to the daily attacks on our portals, and that often cannot be seen without a tool like this."
"On the real time, you can see live traffic, which is flowing into our website."
"There is no need to have an appliance in house for the services because it is on the cloud."
"Scalability is pretty easy on the base platform. You just add another, and you're ready to go."
"I like the user-friendly interface."
"The solution provides significant benefits such as compliance and security. Its data risk analytics tool helps reduce numerous events to more manageable incidents."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the database security policy."
"The most valuable feature is the Data Masking."
"The integration with CounterBreach is great."
"The tool happens to be very intelligent when it comes to processing policies and sounding alerts. It allows us to implement policies and measure actions against them, raising alerts accordingly."
"Flexible reporting allows for customization that keeps the admins from having to interact with system automation."
"This solution has helped secure our Internet-based services, protecting us against DoS and other types of web-based attacks."
"It has a very user-friendly interface that's very detailed."
 

Cons

"DNS Management."
"Technical support is lacking."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"The pricing could be improved."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"Imperva should have more points of presence in Africa."
"The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information."
"It's quite expensive."
"The solution needs to improve Integration with third parties for their on-prem deployment models. The integration is not that good yet."
"A limited tool if you're looking to customize."
"The cost could be lower; our end clients need to have a high budget to purchase this solution."
"Imperva DDoS does not provide version control."
"I would like to have support for SSL management and secure DNS."
"The GUI for this solution could use some improvement."
"The solution needs local support."
"Some cloud versions are not supported by the agent."
"Its reporting can be improved. The reporting feature is currently not good enough for our clients."
"There is sometimes lost communication and it can take a lot of troubleshooting to solve."
"The solution could improve by having more integration."
"The only challenge I see is that SecureSphere is deployed on servers or databases which are held on physical infrastructure. However, there are databases which are hosted on cloud platforms and Imperva has a separate tool altogether for that, not SecureSphere."
"Integration with other databases or third-party products would be useful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The price is reasonable."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"It is expensive."
"Pricing could be more competitive."
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"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."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."
"The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai."
"The price of the solution is reasonable. The cost of the solution depends on the customer, they have the flex protect licensing which can vary in price."
"The price is very high but compared to the price of the overall solution, then I think it's a good deal because the solution itself is great."
"The pricing over-all depends on the entry level. For example, if support and maintenance are about $20,000 - $25,000, the initial cost can be five times more. It is less expensive for the company to maintain the client than to make the deployment."
"The pricing is reasonable and competitive."
"Imperva SecureSphere Database Security was quite expensive several years ago, but now they provide a subscription plan for licensing. It is available now for smaller and medium-sized companies, not only large enterprises."
"Pricing is low and scalable to add features and volume."
"This is an expensive solution and the price should be reduced."
"It is very expensive."
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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
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
15%
Insurance Company
7%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 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 is rated a ten on a scale where ten is very expensive. The solution is only cloud-based and does not prov...
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive. Additionally, support response times for emails can sometimes be d...
How does IBM Guardium Data Protection compare with Imperva SecureSphere Database Security?
IBM Security Guardium Data Protection is a solution for database security from IBM that gives complete visibility, co...
What do you like most about Imperva SecureSphere Database Security?
The tool's pricing is flexible and affordable for small and medium enterprises.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Imperva Incapsula
No data available
 

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.
BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: March 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.