Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Imperva Web Application Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall Report (Updated: March 2024).
772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Imperva WAF vs. Barracuda: Which One is Better?
Answer: To prevent OWASP TOP 10 (SQL Injection, XSS, XSFR...etc) attacks, stop L7 DDoS like SlowLoris and HeavyURL, protect against web fraud, phishing and endpoint malware (Dridex) on endpoint machines outside administrative control, secure application API's, the option to deploy as a managed service in the cloud and available on premises, use DAST integration for policy building with Qualys, Cenzic, Appscan and Whitehat, as well as at the same time provide market leading encryption support for the latest ECC cyphers, network firewalling, Identity and Access Management, Forward Proxy, Global and Local load balancing, DDoS mitigation on premises and in the cloud from layers 3-7 there really can be only one vendor. F5
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Parameter Protection is a valuable feature.""We run it with no downtime, because it has good support.""The solution is user-friendly and easy to set up.""One of the strongest points is its robust issue discovery capabilities. Barracuda invests significant efforts in identifying and resolving issues. They have multiple products that work in tandem to perform these checks, which is beneficial because it automates security updates. This is the primary reason I recommend it to my customers.""Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides optimized performance, a user-friendly environment, helpful dashboards, and is simple to use.""The most valuable feature is the rule set.""Even when we were upgrading to a new OS, we didn't have any difficulties with the product. The stability is good.""It allows us to scale out to multiple phase servers."

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"The features I have found most valuable with Imperva Web Application Firewall are account takeover protection, advanced bot protection, and API security.""It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications.""The solution can scale.""I am impressed with the product's scalability, availability, easy management, and security. We were able to integrate the product with Azure and Sentinel.""Its inline transferring mode is the most valuable because it is 100% transparent. When you change the IP, there is no change on the network side. If you can't and want to try to reach an IP, you can reach the server IP. There are many other advanced security features in it. The smallest appliances of Imperva can handle the highest traffic at a customer site. For example, a smaller appliance from Imperva can provide you the same security as an F5 product.""The most valuable feature of Imperva, in addition to its strong knowledge base, is its effective protection for web applications.""The solution is scalable.""Imperva WAF's strongest features are the detection of web application threats and vulnerabilities in the source code."

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Cons
"An area for improvement in Barracuda Web Application Firewall is attack identification. Other banks identified attacks and tracked logs that the solution wasn't able to identify because of its ready-made rules pre-deployed by the vendor. My organization raised this issue with the technical support team. Another area to improve in Barracuda Web Application Firewall is its service desk. The team resorted to stonewalling because they couldn't accept that a feature was missing in the solution, and it was only after a lot of drilling down that the service desk team accepted that, and would be adding that feature in the future. My organization had to submit a report to the Reserve Bank of India with information on the logs identified and the attacks that happened, and that there was a failure on the part of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. The Reserve Bank of India conducts a tri-monthly cyber risk audit in all Indian banks. Even smaller banks identified and caught attacks that my organization wasn't able to do, so I was looking into other solutions that competitor banks could be using because Barracuda Web Application Firewall failed to identify some of the attacks.""I would like to see an improved capacity to store logs so that they will be available for a longer time.""As most people are aware, the implementation is not easy.""I think the main area for improvement in this product is learning it, as can be seen when comparing it to the F5 web application firewall. F5 has a very powerful learning phase when you start using your web application firewall against your site. Barracuda has something like this, but not with the same functionality from my point of view.""Its interface can be better. It is not very friendly.""We get false positives about phishing emails.""There are issues when upgrading firewalls and we experience different issues across customers.""The reporting aspect of the solution needs improvement. I don't find that it's very good. They could do some work on it to make it much better. It's not that the reporting isn't secure. It's just that I would prefer to store my reports for an extended period of time. Right now, that's not possible and I'd prefer it if that could change. I also would say that the reports themselves are expensive."

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"Their portal is very limited and needs improvement.""The Imperva Web Application Firewall automations are good, but there is still room for improvement with them.""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.""The tool's UI is complicated. It would be best to have a more accessible UI dashboard to make the job easier.""They recently separated the WAF and the DAM management gateways in order for each of these to be managed from different areas, so I believe it now requires additional investments for what was previously a single complete solution.""The user interface could be better.""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."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing is less compared to other web applications."
  • "They have competitive pricing."
  • "Our licensing fees are paid annually and the cost is between €600 and €800 (approximately $665.00 to $885.00 USD)."
  • "Barracuda costs us $8,000 per year. Barracuda costs $20,000 for a full subscription, when you try to protect multi-site infrastructure, in different geographical zones and for different data centers. If you have only one site, Barracuda will be cheaper."
  • "The price of this solution is okay."
  • "The price of the solution is a little expensive. There is a license for this solution and it can be purchased every one, two, or five years."
  • "While I would have to check on the price of the solution, I feel it to be okay and it matches the market price."
  • "The price is reasonable, more so than other products."
  • More Barracuda Web Application Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "Everybody complains about the price of this solution."
  • "The cost of this solution depends on the platform."
  • "The price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."
  • "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."
  • "There is a license for this solution and we purchase the license annually with no additional fees."
  • "There are a couple of different licensing models."
  • "The price of Imperva Web Application Firewalls is expensive compared to others."
  • More Imperva Web Application Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Anonymous User
    it_user567315 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user567315 (Senior Product Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees)
    Consultant

    Really depends on your requirement, budget and IT resources you have. If you are after an advanced WAF, imperva is the clear winner in my opinion. Comprehensive feature set, quite matured. But you will need proper training and experience to manage and get the best out of it. Mind you they are the only leader in Gartner MQ. But the price tag can be high. If you are looking for another good contender, look at Radware AppWall. Their product is good and the fully managed service offering is ideal for someone who has no expertise in WAF, in day today managing and making sure the rule set is optimized.

    BTW Like any security solution, WAF is also as good as how well it is tuned. Specially if you plan to put it inline, make sure you not only consider the product, but a good service partner too.

    it_user523575 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user523575 (Network Engineer at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees)
    Vendor

    They're both great products that provides WAF services at the top of their class and hence not better but more suitable in different scenarios. It all comes down to the environment you wish to deploy those into, the scale of the web services which you will be protecting, the ratio of dynamic pages to static ones, the volume of traffic, the location of your customers/end-users and finally the cost (e.g. you may need to load balance over a few Barracudas to accomplish the same throughput provided by Imperva)

    it_user530328 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user530328 (President at a tech services company)
    Consultant

    Barracuda is deployed in a pinch, but is very clearly a "conformity" WAF. Imperva's is a fulll fledge WAF, very complete, with a lot of granularity and reporting. Imperva's solution requieres a long, costly deployment. Both companies target very different market segments.

    it_user307584 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user307584 (Sr Director of Sales Nordics, Russian Federation, Eurasia & CiS at a consultancy with 201-500 employees)
    Consultant

    Today i would say Barracuda is the better WAF based on that Imperva Dev slowed down over the last two years and the customers give bad feedback on the support, but there is a newer generation of WAF´s in the market that is better than Imperva and Barracuda, both in performance and price, PT application firewall, the only visionary in the GMQ

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs in our environment.
    Top Answer:My company uses the tool for HTTP protection and the protection of HTTP for a particular application that is exposed to the internet. The product offers both the deployment models, which include the… more »
    Top Answer: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. 
    Top Answer: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 Imperva… more »
    Ranking
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    Learn More
    Overview

    Barracuda Web Application Firewall is a game-changing cloud-connected security solution that enables organizations to safeguard both their applications and their data from an ever-growing array of advanced cyber threats. It offers protection from cyber attacks that target not only data and applications stored on the cloud but also those that are housed on web servers. 43% of the time a breach takes place via a compromised application. Barracuda Web Application Firewall prevents these types of breaches from occurring.

    Barracuda Web Application Firewall denies hackers the ability to penetrate your system by using a number of techniques to keep your organization safely insulated. The first method of protection consists of two parts. The first part involves a thorough scanning of all inbound web traffic. This solution monitors everything that comes into the system. It employs IP reputation intelligence, which filters all incoming data. If the source of the data has a bad reputation, it is blocked by the firewall. Administrators now have a way of locking out many common threats that could otherwise compromise sensitive networks. These scans can also allow administrators to protect their systems from within as DLP (Data Loss Prevention) protocols. If any sensitive data attempts to leave, administrators will automatically be alerted and the data will be blocked from exiting.

    Barracuda Web Application Firewall can also be set up to apply the AAA (Authentication, Authorization & Accounting) framework to an organization’s network. If an intruder manages to get past the authentication stage, the authorization protocols kick in. After the authorization stage comes accounting, which works by tracking and logging users’ activities so that administrators will be in a position to prevent long-term damage from being done. This three-step process can be implemented without requiring administrators to make changes to their applications.

    Key Features

    Some of Barracuda Web Application Firewall’s key features include:

    • The ability to employ adaptive profiling. Administrators will have an easier time enforcing security policies once this feature is enabled. It takes data from safe sources and builds profiles that can be used to create whitelisting protocols that prevent unsafe actions from occurring on the system.
    • The ability to assess threats in real time. Barracuda Web Application Firewall uses machine learning to detect new threats and attacks as they emerge.
    • The ability to manage the Barracuda Web Application Firewall system from a single interface. Administrators can manage their Barracuda Web Application Firewall configurations from one centralized location.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Barracuda Web Application Firewall stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. One of the main ones is the robustness of the solution. Users are given access to a vast variety of security features in a single product.

    PeerSpot user Muhammed S., a Presales Solutions Architect at Hilal Computers, notes this when he writes, "The solution offers multiple security features. There are machine learning features and great URL encryption. It also offers multi-protocol support against DDoS attacks."

    Other reviewers note that Barracuda Web Application Firewall is user-friendly, easy to set up, stable, and reliable.

    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.

    Sample Customers
    Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar
    BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider25%
    Media Company13%
    Maritime Company13%
    Wholesaler/Distributor6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company30%
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Insurance Company10%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Insurance Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business67%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise28%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise55%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business53%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise31%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise64%
    Buyer's Guide
    Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Barracuda Web Application Firewall is ranked 15th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 38 reviews while Imperva Web Application Firewall is ranked 6th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 47 reviews. Barracuda Web Application Firewall is rated 8.2, while Imperva Web Application Firewall is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Barracuda Web Application Firewall writes "Provides strong issue discovery capabilities; enhance the security parameters of web applications and suitable for medium to large enterprises". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Imperva Web Application Firewall writes "Offers simulation for studying infrastructure and hybrid infrastructure protection". Barracuda Web Application Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiWeb, F5 Advanced WAF, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, HAProxy and Citrix NetScaler, whereas Imperva Web Application Firewall is most compared with AWS WAF, F5 Advanced WAF, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Fortinet FortiWeb and Azure Web Application Firewall. See our Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall report.

    See our list of best Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors.

    We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.