We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and Imperva Web Application Firewall based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, F5 Advanced WAF seems to be the marginally superior solution. Our reviewers find that Imperva Web Application Firewall‘s cost makes it prohibitive for some organizations to afford.
"I like all of the features, but the main one is the attack signatures."
"It can scale."
"The web application firewall itself is most valuable. It provides positive security and negative security. In negative security, it blocks a task such as cross-site scripting, code injection, etc. In positive security, it lets you specify and enforce things, such as the parameters allowed in username and password fields and the number of characters allowed in a field."
"It's flexible and powerful, and the users can input their own rules to the system."
"In terms of F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features, I would definitely say its stability. F5 is one the most stable products. Either as the load balancer or the web application firewall, it is very stable."
"The anti-bot protection is the solution's most valuable feature. Safe-guard or credential staffing are also useful features."
"One of the most valuable features is the Local Traffic Manager."
"The initial setup was was easy to install."
"Very scalable and very stable firewall for web applications, with a good interface in its cloud version. Mitigation is its most valuable feature. The technical support for this product is also good."
"Very intuitive and granular configuration - It does not require much time, or advanced knowledge, for configuration and maintenance."
"I have had a positive experience with Imperva Web Application Firewall's tech support so far. They are knowledgeable and respond on time."
"Data masking is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The solution has been quite stable. I have not seen any bugs at all."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall is stable."
"There are some features that are configured by default, so even without doing much, it can still provide a level of protection."
"Imperva has a complete picture of how the applications are utilizing it. It is handy. DDoS is good. It has an internally managed database. It is very easy to integrate. We have integrated it with SIEM services."
"Most customers encounter stability issues with the product's Big-IP logs."
"One area for improvement in the product is its SSO integration, which posed challenges and required significant effort to resolve."
"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."
"The contextual-based component needs a lot of help to catch up with the next-gen products."
"F5 Advanced needs to improve its bot protection. The solution needs to have machine learning to learn the behavior of the customer to recognize the human versus the bot. This is a difficult feature to explain to our customers. I would like documentation about the bot feature to make it easier for the customer to understand."
"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."
"It should be a little bit easy to deploy in terms of the overall deployment session. One of our customers is a bit unhappy about the reporting options. Currently, it automatically deletes event logs after some limit if a customer doesn't have any external Syslog server. It is a problem for those customers who want to review event logs after a week or so because they won't get proper reports or event logs. They should increase the duration to at least a month or two for storing the data on the device. F5 is not a leader in Gartner Quadrant, which affects us when we go and pitch this solution. Customers normally go and take a look at such annual reports, and because F5 is currently not there as a leader, the customers ask about it even though we are saying it is good in all things. F5 is not known for something totally different or unique. They were a major player in ADP, and they are just rebranding themselves into security. They should improve or increase their marketing as a security company now. They have already started to do that, but they should do it more so that when it comes to security, customers can easily remember F5. At the moment, if we say F5, load balancing comes to mind. With rebranding and marketing, all customers should get the idea that F5 is now mainly focusing on the security part of it, and it is a security company instead of load balancing. This is the first solution that should come to a customer's mind for a web application firewall."
"While F5 Advanced WAF does limit the number of partners in certain regions to ensure successful business transactions, they could also benefit from expanding their partnerships and making it easier for more people to learn about and become experts in F5 Advanced WAF. By doing so, they could increase the reach and exposure of their solution, similar to how Cisco has become widely recognized in the security industry."
"The process to upgrade from one version to another can be a lot simpler than it is currently."
"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 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."
"I loved the approach of the cloud. The cloud has a lot of new features, like advanced web protection and DDoS protection. If those could also be on-boarded onto the on-prem versions, that would be ideal. They need to pay attention to both deployment options and not just favor one."
"Imperva Web Application Firewall can improve by providing better features, such as improved prevention of zero-day attacks. Additionally, it should include a VR meta-analysis."
"The tool needs to improve CPU and storage memory."
"The only disadvantage of Imperva is that it is a pretty costly solution."
"The user interface could be better."
More Imperva Web Application Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
F5 Advanced WAF is ranked 2nd in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 55 reviews while Imperva Web Application Firewall is ranked 6th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 47 reviews. F5 Advanced WAF is rated 8.6, while Imperva Web Application Firewall is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of F5 Advanced WAF writes "Flexible configuration, reliable, and highly professional support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Imperva Web Application Firewall writes "Offers simulation for studying infrastructure and hybrid infrastructure protection". F5 Advanced WAF is most compared with Fortinet FortiWeb, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, AWS WAF, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, whereas Imperva Web Application Firewall is most compared with AWS WAF, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Fortinet FortiWeb, Azure Front Door and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. See our F5 Advanced WAF vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall report.
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