Fastly vs Imperva: A Competitive Comparison
Experience greater usability, more DevSecOps integrations, and less false positives than regex. See how our intuitive products and unified platform contrast with Imperva’s complexity.
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Almost 90% of Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF customers are in full blocking mode*
Fastly is the only vendor recognized for 6 consecutive years as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Cloud WAAP **
Limited time offer: Get one year free of Next-Gen WAF. Learn more.
Why move to Fastly?
Fewer false positives: Fastly Next-Gen WAF's SmartParse detection engine is able to make highly accurate, contextual classification of attack traffic, eliminating the need for the numerous, maintenance-intensive regex rulesets required by Imperva. Fastly’s approach results in fewer false positives and less tuning toil than regex.
Improved visibility: Unlike traditional WAFs, Fastly's Next-Gen WAF also leverages Signals – clear, easy-to-understand labels attached to requests. These Signals provide deep visibility into traffic behavior, helping you quickly identify, understand, and respond to potential threats.
More performant network: Fastly’s network is more performant than Imperva’s. Fastly’s 336 Tbps1 vs. Imperva’s 13 Tbps (as of May 29, 2024) equates to better customer experiences and enhanced DDoS protection.
Better bot management: For customers needing enhanced visibility and control over bot traffic, Fastly Bot Management takes advantage of the same accuracy, visibility and ease of use of our Next-Gen WAF in a powerful, flexible package.
DevSecOps-friendly: Unlike legacy WAFs, which force developers outside of their toolchain environments to see and fix issues, Fastly’s API-first security portfolio offers single-click integrations with common development and operations alerting engines, chat-ops, project management, and incident tracking systems.
Deploy anywhere: While Imperva is testing container deployment, Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF rapidly deploys and protects everywhere your apps operate - containers, clouds, on-premises, at the edge, and beyond.
Capabilities | Fastly | Imperva |
|---|---|---|
WAAP | ||
Compliance | ||
Protocols | ||
Protection controls | ||
Architecture | ||
Single network | ||
Management & Administration | ||
Configurability | ||
Configuration speed | ||
Ease of use | ||
Programmable, API-first | ||
Native visibility | ||
Appliance-independent | ||
Managed Security | ||
AppSec threat hunting |
Move to a better WAF
Time to shift from Imperva to Fastly. We are committed to making the switch as seamless as possible.
Hear what our customers have to say
“Fastly's new Bot Management solution provides granular visibility and rule setting capability to let the good traffic in and keep the bad traffic out, which will help us protect our content and reduce infrastructure costs.”
Paul Laleu, CTO, Le Monde
“With the Next-Gen WAF, once we turn it on it starts blocking things immediately, right there at the edge. It's identifying all these malicious actors and they’re not making their way to our code at all. It's all being blocked right there at the edge. It's been shockingly easy to use, too.”
Brian Benns, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, GIPHY
“Dealing with false positives is my number one frustration. Since we implemented Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF, I don’t have to spend any time dealing with that. Problem traffic gets black-holded, and I never have to worry about it.”
Sean Hamlin, Technical Account Manager, amazee.io
"The signals-based technology of the Next-Gen WAF lets us do more targeted blocking rather than blocking entire content types or countries,"
Marc Gillitzer, Senior Director of Technology, Life Time
Six years in a row as a Customers’ Choice
See why Fastly was named a Customers’ Choice in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ ‘Voice of the Customer’ for Cloud Web Application and API Protection.
2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)
Learn about the current landscape and what to look for when selecting a cloud WAAP solution.
* Almost 90% of Fastly Next-Gen WAF customers are in full blocking mode, as of March 2023.
** Fastly is the only vendor to be recognized as a Customers’ Choice for six years in a row in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ ‘Voice of the Customer’ for Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP). Download Report.
Related resources
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Embrace the “smart way” of operating your business and see why organizations consistently move from other vendors to Fastly.
Gain helpful insights, examples and strategies for improved web application security.
Explore how your cybersecurity posture is affecting your business’s bottom line, including strategies for protection against evolving threats.
Meet a more powerful global network.
Our network is all about greater efficiency. With our strategically placed points of presence (POPs), you can scale on-demand and deliver seamlessly during major events and traffic spikes. Get the peace of mind that comes with truly reliable performance — wherever users may be browsing, watching, shopping, or doing business.
377 Tbps
Edge network capacity1
150 ms
Mean purge time with Instant Purge™
>1.8 trillion
Daily requests served4
~90% of customers
Run Next-Gen WAF in blocking mode3
As of March 31, 2024
As of December 31, 2019
As of March 31, 2021
As of July 31, 2023
Support plans
Fastly offers several support plans to meet your needs: standard, gold and enterprise.
Standard
Free of charge and available as soon as you sign up with Fastly.
Gold
Proactive alerts for high-impact events, expedited 24/7 incident response times, and a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantee.
Enterprise
Gives you the added benefits of emergency escalation for support cases and 24/7 responses for inquiries (not just incidents).