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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

    Score9.6 out of 10
    N/AF5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.N/A

    Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AThe Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) is based on technology acquired with Incapsula and the former WebSphere WAF.N/A
    Pricing
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    Considered Both Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    48 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    43 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    46 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    37 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    39 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Azure Application Gateway
    Score8.8 out of 10
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    Enterprises
    NetScaler
    Score8 out of 10
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.6
    (49 ratings)
    9.5
    (4 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.7
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    9.5
    (27 ratings)
    9.5
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    F5
    I mean the only reason we changed away from it was price and it just simply had to do with the licensing that Citrix was offering on the NetScalers. They had basically an all you can eat consumption license that we were easily inside of with all of our VDI usage, whereas with F5 we had to buy the hardware and we had to license the software. Any place you need to actually do traffic balancing at scale, it's a fantastic product. I couldn't recommend it highly enough. There's just some things that hardware SSL offload and hardware load balancing just simply can't be equal that I don't know if there's a better product on the market for that.
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    I recommend Imperva specially if you have a big environment with thousand of websites because of its ease to use and availability. Imperva delivers a reliable solution with great capability to contain cyber attacks and even fraud preventions in some cases. The only scenario it's less appropriate is if your focus is anti fraud instead of a solution to block cyber attacks.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    F5
    • Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    • Block some dynamic attacks such as SQL injection.
    • Block unfriendly accesses based on geographic source.
    • Helps us implement SSL in cases where the original server can't (yet).
    Read full review
    Cons
    F5
    • Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    • Attack Correlation Validation - This specific policy produces a lot of false positives as well as the SQL injection policies. Of course it is difficult to tell what a legitimate query is on a public facing web app.
    • Profiling - I tend to spend more time than any other feature tuning the Web App Profiles. Plugins are used to help cope with this, but on extremely large web apps we are forced to turn off the profiling feature.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    F5
    F5 has always been one of the best products we have in the data center. We had few issues with the BUG and Code upgrades but the main use cases for F5 was always top notch. From High availability to Globally load balancing applications across multiple data centers and muti cloud environments.
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    F5
    I am very comfortable with this product not only configuring it but automating it as well. There are not many configurations or situations where I do not know how to implement it on the device. I find it straightforward and easy to use.
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    It's easy and works great. The onboarding process, although easy, can sometimes take too long for SSL and domain validation, but its not a big deal.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    F5
    Good after sales support if one purchased direct support from F5.
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    We haven't needed support from Imperva since implementation. But during that time, their personnel were very quick to respond to questions. Since then, it's been largely doing its thing for us (which is exactly what we'd hoped).
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    Implementation Rating
    F5
    Easy to implement if one had attended F5 Training for Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    F5
    F5 is doing its specialized function. There is no other product that can beat them. We are extremely happy with the product. Especially on load balancing, traffic redirecting TLS encryption, and SNI modification. We will continue to explore F5's product, especially on the public cloud side. e.g. NGINX.
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    I believe there's no comparison as Imperva is a much more reliable and powerfull WAF. AWS WAF lacks of several features Imperva have and is not that simple to configure neither have a clean web console. I consider Imperva WAF a whole superior level of cyber security solution and it's consider to be one of the leader in this segment.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    F5
    • It has allowed us to let application developers know that the issues are with their application and not due to the network, because of where it sits. This has been invaluable when troubleshooting issues when they arise. Knowing whether or not traffic is even hitting the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), either ingress or outgoing. If the Dev's information is not even making it to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), we can quickly tell them and let them figure the issue out on their own, saving the rest of the Network Team from getting that 2am call.
    Incentivized
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    Imperva, a Thales company
    • Meet compliance requirements - Check.
    • Better Insight into web application - Absolutely great, checks all the traffic against RFC standards and will alert on common development mistakes that duplicate application traffic or provide attack vectors for potential attackers.
    • Have had several issues blocking a customer without producing alerts, while it happened only one week out of 2 years of working with the devices, it did produce a lot of headaches.
    Incentivized
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