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).
768,578 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
"Has a good dashboard.""The stability of the solution is good. I don't think we've experienced bugs, crashes, or glitches.""The solution ensures layer seven is secure from attacks.""We use Barracuda to protect the application. That's the main feature we use it for.""What I like most about Barracuda Web Application Firewall is its availability. I also like that it's an easy-to-use solution.""Its recommendation about the probabilities on the website is great. It also has free probability managers for the website, which is really helpful. The protection engine, signature-based protection behavior, and analysis features are also great. It also has an ATP module for sandbox scanning and behavior analysis for file uploads.""You don't need help from Barracuda to help with the deployment. The deployment is easy.""The stability of the product is good. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

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"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features.""Imperva Web Application Firewall is a highly stable solution and is very mature.""We can prevent attacks or issues even before they happen.""There is a quick switch between any of the the nodes if something goes wrong, where there's a there's an attack against a specific area. The security setup is reasonably easy. It's not a problem to do setups and rules and integrations. And, yeah, just the the back end team is also very willing to insist if there's questions that that we cannot answer or with these questions that we do have""It mitigates all of the availabilities of risks around web applications.""The most important feature I have found to be the ease in how to do the backup and restores.""The configurability of the tools and the ease of operation to be the most valuable feature of Imperva.""Compared to other web application firewalls in the market, Imperva does things in the most accurate way."

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Cons
"The incident reporting needs to be improved.""The documentation is lacking. It's not like what you'd get if you were using Juniper or Cisco. They need to expand on it and make it more useful.""I would suggest that someone implementing this product is knowledgeable in the IT field, and with the network needs. It is complex.""As most people are aware, the implementation is not easy.""The solution could use more reports.""The GUI needs to be improved because it sometimes hangs and needs to be restarted.""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.""It is not stable nor mature."

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"They can provide an option to create reports, automatically import the entire report, and create rules again. In a real-life crisis, it would be helpful to be able to import a report and generate security rules from that report. I should be able to create a simple query and import the reports automatically. It can maybe also tell us the format of the report.""The process to upgrade from one version to another can be a lot simpler than it is currently.""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.""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.""It should be more user-friendly. Like other web solutions, it would be helpful to be able to easily do policy configuration and identification inside the application. Understanding the in-depth configuration of a policy is somewhat difficult for an engineer, and they can improve that.""The user interface could be better.""The initial setup could be simplified. Every time you have to install the solution you have to get in touch with support or somebody that can to do that for you.""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."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Cons →

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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    8.7
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    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 Company26%
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Insurance Company11%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Insurance Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business67%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise28%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business54%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise30%
    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.
    768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Barracuda Web Application Firewall is ranked 14th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 38 reviews while Imperva Web Application Firewall is ranked 6th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 45 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.