Cloudflare vs. Imperva Incapsula
As of June 2019, Cloudflare is ranked 2nd in DDoS with 8 reviews vs Imperva Incapsula which is ranked 3rd in DDoS with 5 reviews. The top reviewer of Cloudflare writes "The dashboard is very well thought out, giving useful information". The top reviewer of Imperva Incapsula writes "We have peace of mind that nobody will use malware on us or try to hack our website". Cloudflare is most compared with Imperva Incapsula, Sucuri and Akamai. Imperva Incapsula is most compared with Cloudflare, Imperva SecureSphere Web Application Firewall and F5 BIG-IP. See our Cloudflare vs. Imperva Incapsula report.
Most Helpful Review | |||
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 Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Imperva Incapsula and other solutions. Updated: May 2019. 345,805 professionals have used our research since 2012. | |||
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros | |
The technical support is good. 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. Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations. When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers. Centralized, full-featured DNS. The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules. Easier http to https redirect using page rules | Provides Anti-DDoS protection, as well as other protections like SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and antiscanner. These types of protection are valuable to the business due to the daily attacks on our portals, and that often cannot be seen without a tool like this. Setup was straightforward, very simple. I only entered the domain and Incapsula returned the DNS data that I needed to change for the protection to be configured. On the site security, I can see which countries have incidents, whether it was a robot attack, a real human user, or non-human user. On the activity log, I can see the exact details, the visit, and the threat. The dashboard is good and user-friendly. On the real time, you can see live traffic, which is flowing into our website. We have peace of mind that nobody will use malware on us or try to hack our website. The complete solution is valuable for everything it delivers and the protection it offers. |
Cons | |
The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage. If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag. Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript. They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem. 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. I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution. The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened. DNS Management. | Imperva now offers add-ons to add functionality, but I would like to see these included in the product, even if it would cost more. 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. I miss being able to integrate the dashboard with other BI tools we are using. We have to export and import data to be able to present it, and doing so is a lot of work. It would be better if we were able to manage and apply changes to multiple websites/web applications, and search WAF logs for multiple websites, via the Incapsula dashboard. |
Pricing and Cost Advice | |
There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers. So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed. | Although the pricing can be a little high, it is worth the protection and security that it offers. For enterprise contracts you will be in touch with a dedicated account manager who will guide you regarding licensing. |
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Answers from the Community | |||
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Ranking  | |||
Views 27,817 Comparisons 12,947 Reviews 8 Average Words per Review 361 Avg. Rating 8.5 | Views 30,704 Comparisons 8,864 Reviews 5 Average Words per Review 435 Avg. Rating 9.4 | ||
Top Comparisons | |||
 Compared 22% of the time.  Compared 9% of the time.  Compared 6% of the time. |  Compared 31% of the time.  Compared 10% of the time.  Compared 6% of the time. | ||
Learn | |||
| Cloudflare | Incapsula | ||
Overview | |||
Cloudflare is the leading performance and security company helping to build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers more than 9 million Internet applications. More than 10 trillion Internet requests flow through Cloudflare’s network each month, accounting for nearly 10% of all Internet requests globally. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with each new site added. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. | Imperva Incapsula is a cloud-based application delivery service that protects websites and safeguards web applications and their data from attacks, and improves their performance by enhancing user experience. Incapsula includes a security platform with a web application firewall, DDoS mitigation, content delivery network, and global load balancer to maximize performance. | ||
Offer | |||
Learn more about Cloudflare | Download Now Get your free report today! | ||
Sample Customers | |||
| Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more. | Hitachi, BNZ, Bitstamp, Moz, InnoGames, BTCChina, Wix, LivePerson, Zillow and more. | ||
Top Industries | |||
Financial Services Firm18% Engineering Company18% Energy/Utilities Company18% Marketing Services Firm18% | Financial Services Firm16% Non Tech Company16% Real Estate/Law Firm8% Media Company8% Financial Services Firm33% Writing And Editing Position14% Comms Service Provider10% Healthcare Company10% | ||
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Imperva Incapsula and other solutions. Updated: May 2019.
345,805 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See also Cloudflare Reviews, Imperva Incapsula Reviews, and our list of Best DDoS Companies.
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Hello, As Carlos and Barry mentioned all of them are good. One has to choose CDN based on their priorities like if their main priority is saving website from DDoS or Performance or Quick Site failover mechanism and of course keeping it under cost. If you go with Cloudflare they have more PoP then Incapsula. When it comes to origin shield, you need to buy it separately in CloudFlare but in Incapsula its included. There are lot of factors on which you can differentiate between them but i would personally suggest instead of comparing two products, firstly write down your needs and prioritize them. It will help you to choose right product under your project budget.
Cheers.
Neither is better or worse. Full disclosure, I’m build new security tools @ Akamai. Some would say Akamai is better than both. But... in truth it all depends on:
1. What service you are defending.
2. What is your tolerance of “DOS downtime” to your business.
Each company is going to be different for different reasons. There is no “this one is better than that one.” It is ALL SITUATIONAL ON THE ORGANIZATION”S REQUIREMENTS!.
For example, if I have an API I need to protect from DOS attack because there are IoT applications which depend on it, I would look for a API scaling solution (like Akamai) or a IoT scaling solutions (Akamai’s IoT Edge Connect).
Contrast that with me and my personal website. It is simple and straight forward Wordpress. Easy for Cloudflare (which I use).
It does not mean one is better than the other. It just means one fits the requirements/cost.
Hello, happy to be able to help, although cloudfare has the largest CDN network and currently distributed, what we should look at when choosing a DDoS solution is in the technology of scrubbing center, this technology is what allows filtering and stop attacks of this type more easily, although the incapsula CDN network has 40 PoP in the world all of them are scrubing centers, versus the rest that if I remember correctly only have some with this technology, I hope I have helped you I insist that both solutions are good.
Greetings.
One important point to keep in mind is how to achieve comprehensive protection of *all* your assets, not only the ones hosted on the CDN. What about corporate internet access? your own origin servers? services other than web?
Visibility is also very important. what is happening during a ddos attack? what attack vectors are being used? why traffic is dropped or passed? what ability you have to surgically apply filters and countermeasures?
Does the service provide 24/7 access to expert SOC operators?
Depends of what you're looking for. Just CDN? Or also website protection (WAF)?
And are there cost requirements/restrictions?
Some services like Cloudbric offer DDoS protection, SSL, and WAF for free (if monthly traffic is kept to 4BG).
Choose Imperva. We used this WAF in conjunction with ImmuniWeb (they have partnership) https://www.htbridge.com/immuniweb/partners/TAP/. No complaints. Zero false positives and no cost for integration. Plus.
I recommend the solutions from Radware - https://www.radware.com/products/cloud-ddos-services/
Cloudflare