Imperva DDoS Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

reviewer1407915

Information System Security Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 2, 2020

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A very secure platform for protecting our website and web applications

Pros and Cons

"It blocks all types of attacks."

"It's quite expensive."

What is our primary use case?

We are using this solution for web application firewall protection for the website and web application. I'm a user of this product and work as an information systems security manager.

What is most valuable?

I'm very happy with the solution. The most valuable aspect of it is that it blocks all types of attacks.

What needs improvement?

I think the product could be improved by reducing the price. It would help if they came up with pricing options because as it is now if you're a big company and use the site often, it's more expensive.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for almost four years.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability and scalability are fine.

How are customer service and support?

I don't use the technical support, but my colleagues do and they haven't mentioned any problems.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Joakim Sörqvist

Senior Systems Engineer - Channel Manager at Exclusive GRP

Sep 2, 2019

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A solution that's easy to implement, but doesn't offer local support

Pros and Cons

"They're quite easy to install and quite easy to set up. Clients really like that. Especially when you're dealing with the cloud, it's really easy."

"We would like them to hire people in Sweden because it's quite hard when people are sitting in the UK or Belgium because some of the customers really want them to be local."

What is our primary use case?

The solution increases the amount of protection for a client's products and solutions in their country.

What is most valuable?

They're quite easy to install and quite easy to set up. Clients really like that. Especially when you're dealing with the cloud, it's really easy.

It also has the ability to integrate with other firewalls. That's really important today. Most end-users are looking for something that can integrate with other solutions and with APIs. They're looking for solutions that have an open API.

What needs improvement?

The solution needs to ensure they are compliant and can show the customer in a visual way, like a ticked box, that they are protected. They need to ensure their solution is showcasing if their system is getting attacked so clients know if or when they are under attack.

Clients also often complain about the cost of the solution. They should consider adjusting their pricing models.

We would like them to hire people in Sweden because it's quite hard when people are sitting in the UK or Belgium because some of the customers really want them to be local.

In the next version, they could include more products or more solutions in this solution that you can add on. They need to build more features that they can add so they can help the customers who don't have a particular solution in hand. Most of the end-users are looking for an easy way to manage all of their solutions. Today we're selling a lot of smaller solutions, and they need to have a lot of different management solutions that we can offer to clients.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been selling the solution for 1.5 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is really stable. It's good. It's a product that I can stand by and recommend because I know it's going to work for the customer.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good, especially when you sell a solution that's in the cloud. That's easier to scale; you can just upgrade it.

How are customer service and technical support?

We don't directly deal with technical support, but I've never heard of any problems or complaints from clients.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We deploy the solution for our client. Sometimes Imperva also assists.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing depends on the client. Usually, it's yearly, but we do offer monthly financing.

The only thing I hear complaints about is that in some cases clients want to be able to scale down. They don't want to buy everything. That could be, in Sweden anyway, a big problem, because they need to buy more licenses than they will use. In some cases, some of the resellers would like if it was possible to scale down, to have smaller option. However, they don't have that.

What other advice do I have?

I'm a distributor for this product.

With the ease of implementation, I think is a good product. A lot of the other products need a lot of professional services to make it work. With this solution, it's very, very easy to implement, which is a strong selling point.

They also have a good range of products that they sell.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten. It's more than one issue that has me rating it at seven. It's quite a big solution, so it's hard to get a smaller company to buy it. They don't have people in Sweden either. That's really important for us, because it's harder for Swedish companies to be serious about the product when there's a lot of other vendors that have local people, and that's preferred by clients.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller.

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it_user510588

IT Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Sep 27, 2016

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It can hide the true origin and provide access control. Their customer service sometimes has different responses for similar requests.

What is most valuable?

Hidden origin
IP whitelist
Country blocking
Anti-DDoS
Special page protection (two-factor authentication)

How has it helped my organization?

For example, we host a website for customer in China. Incapsula can help to hide the real origin and provide access control over different pages. And it can protect the website from being attacked.

Incapsula provides 7x24 service for protection, which saves us a lot of manpower.

What needs improvement?

Customer service: Their customer service sometimes has different responses for similar requests. We sometimes need to explain the issue many times before they understand. Their CS staff is not well trained according to a consistent standard. For the same requests, some of them can perform well, but some of them might do it wrong.
Network management: Their network department sometimes doesn’t take the responsibility to improve network latency until we raise the problem many times or to top management. Sometimes, we encounter latency issues. Only sometimes does their network staff update their routing to improve the performance. Other times, they will not do so and they push the responsibility to another carrier.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Sometimes their system has routed our Asia traffic to US/EU and we needed to ask them to change the route back to Asia.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Their Asia bandwidth, i.e. to China, sometimes has a lot of lag. And they take a long time to improve it, until they add a new ISP to improve the bandwidth.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is 7/10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used Akamai. Incapsula is much cheaper and the administration is much easier.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup is easy, as Incapsula allows us to create new sites through their GUI or using an API.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Incapsula pricing is very affordable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

What other advice do I have?

If you don’t have a strong IT team for security, Incapsula is a good starting point for outsourcing your internet-facing security issues.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user326337Customer Success Manager at PeerSpot

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Sep 28, 2016

This review by Tom Judd may be helpful as an example for how other companies have benefitted/utilized Imperva's Technical Support --

www.itcentralstation.com

it_user279876

IT Manager with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 28, 2015

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Because of the load balance functionality, our site is available despite attacks.

What is most valuable?

DDOS defence
Load balancing
Security role

How has it helped my organization?

The availability of our sites, thanks to the load balance functionality, has improved. It enables the site to be available all the time, despite people trying to attack it.

What needs improvement?

More features to help fine tune it. In general, more features for the platform would be nice.

For how long have I used the solution?

I’ve used it for two to three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

I used the customer service once.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Once or twice, there has been downtime, but it was only a matter of minutes.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

It was pretty high quality service. They guarantee to fix your problem within 15 minutes, but they don’t always keep their word.

Technical Support:

They are professional people who provide solutions.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No previous solution used.

How was the initial setup?

It was very simple.

What about the implementation team?

It was done in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price is between $5,000 and $10,000.

What other advice do I have?

The product experience is really easy, therefore you should go and experience it.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

it_user11580

Director of eCommerce with 51-200 employees

May 1, 2014

Incapsula provides enterprise-grade security and acceleration to our customers at an affordable price

We currently host over 1,100 websites and our clients include some of Australia's best known online retail success stories and its largest eBay trader. The nature of the e-commerce business poses a wide range of challenges that we need to deal with on a daily basis in order to keep our clients' online stores up and running. For our clients, time is (literally) money and it’s our responsibility to make sure that all potential problems are handled quickly, before they affect any business transactions.

Security is obviously an issue we couldn’t afford to ignore. We spent several months searching for a solution that could meet our clients' demanding security and performance requirements. As it happened, Incapsula had just opened a new data center in Australia, so we decided to give them a try as well. Their cloud-based service won us over - hands down.

To help companies out there facing similar issues, I wanted to share five key factors that influenced our decision to implement Incapsula.

1. Reseller Support and Integration Options Integration of new services can be difficult, both from marketing and technology standpoints. Thankfully, Incapsula provided plenty of options, including a cPanel integration and an extremely user-friendly API with interesting reseller-oriented capabilities.

While reviewing these tools, we came up with a lot of integration ideas. We batted these ideas back and forth with Incapsula's responsive support team and came back impressed with their ability to provide quick and complete answers to our questions.

Integration always takes time. While we are still working on ours, we know that having the right tools is half the battle. Having the right support makes the other half just a matter of time.

2. Comprehensive Security The commercial potential of e-commerce sites makes them a lucrative target for an ever-growing array of threats, from code-based vulnerabilities to DDoS attacks. Accordingly, we understand that our clients require reliable security solution, to protect their hosted sites from all types of threats and keep things running as smooth as possible.

We also know that by taking on more merchants and increasing our total web presence we increase the likelihood of becoming a target. For fast growing hosting platforms, where multiple sites used shared resources, this is a serious issue. After all, the entire server is only as strong as its "weakest link," and one unprotected site can cause substantial collateral damage to our clients, as well as to our own brand reputation and business goals.

For that reason it was important for us to have a comprehensive solution that helps us cover all bases. With its PCI compliant WAF, DDoS protection and bot filtering technologies, Incapsula helps us do just that – protecting our clients from targeted and automated cyber threats. Today, as Incapsula gets adopted by more and more of our clients, the result is a continual improvement in the resilience of our entire hosted community.

3. No Sweat PCI Compliance PCI compliance is a must for our e-commerce clients so it was important for us to know that Incapsula’s WAF is certified by the PCI Security Standards.

Anyone that ever dealt with PCI DSS knows about the dreaded 6.6 requirement. Incapsula meets these specifications with ease, by providing a PCI-compliant WAF for a ridiculously small fraction of the usual price. Basically, it offers a $60 solution to a problem that can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to address.

4. Great Value at a Price Your Clients Can Afford To ensure that our clients would benefit from these added-value services, they had to be affordable. Otherwise, no one would sign up. Incapsula's "economy of scale" pricing model made this possible.

As mentioned, the WAF alone would cost somewhere between $10,000 -$30,000, before man-hours and maintenance fees. Incapsula's bundled service also includes a CDN, dynamic caching, DDoS protection and other features, making it a highly attractive and cost-effective solution for commercial sites.

This combination of top-tier technology and mid-market prices makes Incapsula a perfect fit for our merchant clients and still allows us to retain a good reseller margin. Incapsula’s security and performance services also enhance the value of our overall offering, improving our client acquisition and retention to further increase our bottom line.

5. A Partner Who's Got Your Back Most importantly, it's very assuring to know that our own internal team is always backed up by a team of security and networking experts. Incapsula's technical, support and marketing teams have been extremely responsive, reliable and flexible. They worked with us through the initial roll out, and were quick to handle a few minor teething issues, even making changes to their standard system to meet our needs.

Having a partner who goes the extra mile means a lot and really reinforces our trust, both in the technology itself and in the people behind the technology.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.

it_user11574

CEO with 51-200 employees

Oct 13, 2013

We have gone through paid evaluations of several DDoS mitigation services, but all of them failed to block DDOS attacks

Our company has recently reached 3.5 million registered users and 200,000 hosted websites. Daily DDoS attacks on our platform resulted in unnecessary and prolonged downtime for the thousands of sites on our network. These attacks included network level (layer 3 & 4) attacks ranging from 2Gbps to 10Gbps with various attack vectors such as UDP attacks but most commonly SYN floods which exploit the TCP three-way handshake to consume the server’s connection resources. The more challenging attacks were the diverse application level (Layer 7) attacks. These attacks seem as if they are originating from legitimate sources, try to mimic human behavior and consume the backend computing resources of the website.

We were seeing daily DDOS attacks, sometimes multiple DDOS attacks in parallel on various client websites. Since our company is a global hosted community platform and social network, everyone was affected at the same time. We needed to make sure that no attack on any one website could bring other websites down. We have gone through paid evaluations of several DDoS Mitigation services, but all of them failed to block DDOS attacks automatically without serious side effects, as blocking legitimate visitors

Once we decided to evaluate Incapsula's Cloud-Based DoS protection, Incapsula's team quickly helped us to setup a few of our websites on the service.

Once we joined Incapsula, they immediately identified that our network was under various types of attacks at almost any given time, both network and application level attacks.

While the network based attacks were absorbed by Incapsula’s backbone, the application layer attacks were very diverse. Incapsula relied very heavily on their bot detection and progressive DDoS challenge technology, to block 100% of attackers transparently, without incurring any noticeable effect to almost all of the real users.

Maintaining the best possible customer experience was a key consideration for us. It was very apparent why other DDoS protection services that involve delays, CAPCHAs and other side effect on visitors' would not work for us. Also, a DDoS solution that isn't fully automated, would keep our team constantly busy to enable/disable the protection service.

Incapsula’s ability to allow human and legitimate bot traffic to access the website with no interruption, while filtering network and application level DDoS traffic, allowed us to put our DDoS problems behind and focus on what we do best, which is building a great platform for the online gamers community.

Incapsula is now a critical component of our security infrastructure. All traffic to our network and hosted websites passes through Incapsula for screening. Malicious traffic and DDOS attacks are blocked automatically.

We take advantage of Incapsula's DDoS Protection key benefits, to secure our online properties:

Protection against Network and Application Level Attacks- Through a worldwide network of multi-gigabit scrubbing centers and unique bot (automation) detection technology, Incapsula provides complete protection for both network (Layer 3 & 4) and application level (Layer 7) DDoS attacks.
24x7 Managed Security Service- Incapsula’s DDoS security team monitors attacks and is available on-demand before, during or after attacks to ensure that our sites are up and running and performing.
vZero Business Disruption- Incapsula’s CDN and bot detection technology ensure that even under attack, our website traffic is accelerated and legitimate visitors are not delayed or denied access to our sites.

Our network was finally clear from the endless onslaught of crippling UDP & SYN flood attacks that we had been experiencing. Using Incapsula's dashboard, we were able to see exactly when each attack was happening, and continue delivering service to millions of users during the attack. We also saw a sharp drop in unwanted bot activity, which resulted in a 20% drop in load on our servers. A key feature we were looking for is a very low false positive rate during mitigation. Incapsula proved to have a near zero false positive rate, and legitimate users had no trouble accessing our websites during prolonged DDOS attacks.

it_user182781Director at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees

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Jan 19, 2015

Incapsula helped us mitigate 80GB/s multilayered ddos attacks and nearly immunized us completely against network layer attacks. They also stopped attacks that didn't have names within hours. I can't say there is never downtime but thats the case with any serious denial of service....but in the hundreds of thousands of dollars my clients spent on live testing ddos firewalls, incapsula's team, system and interface were simply the best.

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reviewer1322772

Information Security Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 15, 2020

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Good DDoS and bot features, but it needs support for SSL management

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable features for us are the DDoS and Bot."

"I would like to have support for SSL management and secure DNS."

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features for us are the DDoS and Bot.

What needs improvement?

I would like to have support for SSL management and secure DNS.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Imperva for more than a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have had no problems with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Imperva is a scalable solution. We have about 20 users but it's protecting our main website.

How are customer service and technical support?

I would say that technical support is average.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use another similar solution prior to Imperva.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was simple. It took about two hours to deploy.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The cost is on par with other solutions such as Cloudflare and Akamai. There's not much difference in it.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user508662

IT & DevOps Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 29, 2016

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It has SSL support and content caching. You can 'play' with the rules as much as you'd like.

What is most valuable?

We are using Incapsula as our web application firewall and for DDoS protection, and it performs really well at its job. Incapsula packs some great features, such as SSL support, content caching and the ability to 'play' with the rules as much as you'd like.

How has it helped my organization?

Since this is the very first WAF solution that we evaluated and tried to integrate into our AWS environment, I can't really say that it has improved anything, but the fact is, we never looked the other way.

What needs improvement?

Incapsula has a built-in monitoring module, but it is a paid feature; I would expect that for the price we pay for the basic service, we would be able to integrate a monitoring solution, even a simple one.

In addition to that, Incapsula doesn't feature the option to add/remove available SSL protocols and/or ciphers.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Incapsula for a little more than six months.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

The only problem we encountered with Incapsula regarding deployment is with their Performance solution that allows caching the hosted sites. The dynamic caching sometimes causes issues and we need to manually purge all of the cache from their system after a new version has been deployed, in order for new content to load properly.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is excellent. In the few times we tried to contact Imperva's support, we received quick and swift replies.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I did not previously use a different solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment is very straightforward; you follow a very simple setup wizard that guides you which changes you need to perform and where.

What about the implementation team?

We received the recommendation regarding Incapsula from Emind, a third-party vendor that helped us deploy our environment over at Amazon. The rest was performed by our in-house IT/Devops teams.

What other advice do I have?

I highly recommend Incapsula for anyone that is looking to integrate a WAF and DDoS protection into their environment.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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