Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Symantec Web Application Firewall comparison

Imperva and Broadcom are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Imperva is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.9, while Broadcom is ranked #44. Additionally, 97% of Imperva users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Imperva Web Application Firewall and Symantec Web Application Firewall are products in the web security market. Imperva seems to have the upper hand due to its flexibility and advanced features, while Symantec is more straightforward and user-friendly.

Features: Imperva Web Application Firewall offers advanced security controls, precise traffic inspection, and comprehensive reporting capabilities. Symantec Web Application Firewall is known for its simplicity, ease of integration, and streamlined protection.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Imperva's deployment can be complex but is supported by robust customer service for a smoother implementation. Symantec offers a simpler deployment model with an attractive quick setup process and effective customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Imperva typically involves higher initial setup costs but provides strong ROI for enterprises with sophisticated security needs. Symantec is cost-effective, offering solid ROI through efficient protection and lower maintenance expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall

April 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Abdullah Jin

Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers bot protection and DDoS Protection and protects public-facing portals

Support is one thing I wish Imperva could improve. They follow the phone model and keep rotating you from one customer service person to another. The layer one support isn't very clear about the workings of the product. My feedback is primarily about Imperva Cloud, not on-premise. On-premise is a whole new story. Support is the issue for Imperva Cloud. It's also a bit pricey. It's a premium service and very expensive. The licensing model is not very straightforward. Every feature is priced separately, and to enjoy maximum protection, you'll have to spend a lot of money. The licensing model is a bit complex, and each feature is very pricey. For example, API security and web application protection are two separate license packages.

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reviewer1231533

Head IT Infrastructure (DGM-IT) at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

An excellent up-to-date data repository handling external threats successfully

We have multiple applications that we wanted to ensure were protected and we chose Symantec for that. I'm the head of IT infrastructure and we are partners with Symantec. Symantec has specifically helped connect external users to our internal network. It has also enabled us to ensure that those…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

More Cloudflare pros

"It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications."

"The solution can scale."

"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 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."

"Very intuitive and granular configuration - It does not require much time, or advanced knowledge, for configuration and maintenance."

"The solution is scalable."

"The solution is stable."

"The configurability of the tools and the ease of operation to be the most valuable feature of Imperva."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

"The interface is user-friendly."

"The setup was straightforward."

"The solution has an up-to-date data repository to deal with external threats."

Cons

"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"The pricing could be improved."

"DNS Management."

"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."

"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."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

More Cloudflare cons

"I don't really use it and therefore can't speak to areas of improvement."

"There's always room for improvement. Occasionally, there might be false-positive alerts."

"It would be useful if the solution used more intelligence in attack protection. For example, firewalls are to be dependent on the configuration, but if they could have some data science around it the solution would be even better. The profiling of the traffic, and making decisions surrounding that should be intelligence-based, instead of being based on the configuration of the firewall itself."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve the API integration. It was complex for us. Additionally, The onboarding could be better."

"One potential improvement for Imperva is enhancing its alert system."

"In the past, I have bugs on the WAF. I've contacted Imperva about them. Future releases should be less buggy."

"The signature updates could be faster. Sometimes we have to upload signatures to the Imperva portal for checking and analysis before we can use them."

"The only disadvantage of Imperva is that it is a pretty costly solution."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

"I'm not convinced that it's necessary the best solution going forward in the future."

"Sometimes scanning slows down the endpoints."

"It would be an improvement if the management dashboards were not reliant upon Java."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A free version of the solution is available."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"We are using the free version."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"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 price of the solution is expensive."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is very costly, but the return on investment is very high. Its cost was around $70,000, and we got it back in just six months."

"We sell three-year licenses for Imperva Web Application Firewall to our customers. The price is a little expensive."

"The solution's pricing is an issue."

"Licensing can range from one to twenty thousand dollars annually. Additionally, some features, including software support, require an annual subscription as well."

"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."

"Everybody complains about the price of this solution."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive."

"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."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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...

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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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

My recommendation is Imperva.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

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Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 15% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

No data available

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

April 2025

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

May 2025

Symantec Web Application Firewall report

Download Symantec Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Symantec WAF, Blue Coat Protecting Web Applications

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Imperva Web Application Firewall is a versatile solution that protects web applications and databases from various attacks, including DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks. It offers data security, availability, and access control and can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud.

The solution has good security against web attacks and offers advanced bot protection, API security, and mitigation features. Imperva WAF is easy to configure and deploy; it has good customer service and an excellent user interface.

Imperva

The Symantec Web Application Firewall (WAF) enables you to secure and accelerate your web applications.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall

April 2025

Free Report: Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall

Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Symantec Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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