Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
The Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) is based on technology acquired with Incapsula and the former WebSphere WAF.N/A
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Pricing
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)NGINX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)NGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)NGINX
Features
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)NGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.8
43 Ratings
10% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings8.127 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.638 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.939 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings9.139 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.140 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings9.037 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)NGINX
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprises
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 7.9 out of 10
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User Ratings
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)NGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(4 ratings)
9.3
(72 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(3 ratings)
8.3
(25 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)NGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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F5
Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
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Pros
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).
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F5
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
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Cons
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.
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F5
  • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
  • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
  • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
  • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
  • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
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Likelihood to Renew
Imperva, a Thales company
No answers on this topic
F5
Great value for the product
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Usability
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.
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F5
This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers
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Support Rating
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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F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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F5
I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
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Return on Investment
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.
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F5
  • By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
  • Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
  • Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration