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Imperva DDoS vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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

Imperva DDoS
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (8th)
Imperva Web Application Fir...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Imperva DDoS is 1.9%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Imperva Web Application Firewall is 5.8%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

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

"It is an effective threat mitigation tool."
"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is easy to configure."
"​Technical support provides good, quick responses."
"The most valuable feature of Imperva DDoS is to make our website available for our customers' requests 24 hours a day."
"The setup of Imperva DDoS was easy."
"It blocks all types of attacks."
"On the activity log, I can see the exact details, the visit, and the threat."
"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."
"Protection is the best solution since it has profile functionality."
"The solution integrates seamlessly with other tools and has a good alert mechanism."
"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."
"It is easy to use and has good security."
"It works right out of the box once you integrate the application."
"The solution is very scalable. It is one of the most important features. You can also expand resources and features as well."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"A limited tool if you're looking to customize."
"I am not sure if this application has a policy where you can create your custom policy and run it as our firewall. We should have some ability to also create some custom policy, then run it as a firewall."
"The log analytics interface within Incapsula isn't really good. For example, if you have to get all logs from there, it's a very cumbersome process."
"Imperva always needs to adjust to new versions of cyber attacks, it needs to be faster, improve the resiliency of the software of the solution."
"There’s nothing that’s missing in terms of features."
"The solution needs to improve Integration with third parties for their on-prem deployment models. The integration is not that good yet."
"Incapsula services also provides load balancing services for their service IP address environment. So far, with monitoring their services, the IP address was only changed once."
"I would like to see improvements in the pooling of threats and attacks, possibly to enlarge the scale of indicators of compromise."
"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."
"Their portal is very limited and needs improvement."
"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."
"Sometimes our web application firewall will slow down."
"There is nothing specific where the application firewall is falling short."
"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."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is a good system, but we found that the visibility of the diverse-path server, e.g. where the traffic is coming from, the different IPs, etc., needs improvement."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the console by making it easier to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We have an issue with Imperva Incapsula in the Iraqi market because of the high price."
"The data packages are higher than our needs so we end up paying for data that we don't use."
"​Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers.​"
"Varies depending on the needs of the customer."
"It is expensive."
"Imperva charges us based on bandwidth, which is better than other vendors that charge us according to data transfer."
"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."
"The price of Imperva Web Application Firewalls is expensive compared to others."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the price."
"The price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."
"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."
"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."
"There are a couple of different licensing models."
"The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries."
"The cost of this solution depends on the platform."
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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
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 provide on-premises services.
What needs improvement with Imperva DDoS?
Pricing can be improved, as it is quite expensive. Additionally, support response times for emails can sometimes be delayed, which is an area that could use improvement.
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 have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.
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 of DDoS attacks that were well managed (even not seen by the customer) by Imperv...
 

Also Known As

Imperva Incapsula
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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 Imperva DDoS vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.