Fastly Content Delivery Network vs Imperva DDoS Protection: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Fastly Content Delivery Network

Organizations shipping high-traffic applications need Fastly Content Delivery Network primarily for its real-time configuration control and instant purge capability, which let you push security fixes to edge servers without waiting for cache invalidation cycles. The platform covers three core NIST CSF 2.0 areas,infrastructure resilience, platform security, and continuous monitoring,with particular strength in the last two through real-time log streaming and anomaly detection at the edge. Skip this if your main concern is origin-layer protection; Fastly assumes your backend security is handled elsewhere and focuses exclusively on the perimeter and delivery tier.

Imperva DDoS Protection

Teams protecting APIs and web applications under sustained volumetric attack need Imperva DDoS Protection for its 3-second mitigation SLA on Layer 3 and 4 floods, which eliminates the window where traffic actually reaches your infrastructure. The 13 Tbps global scrubbing capacity and Anycast routing handle the size of attacks most vendors only claim to handle. Skip this if your DDoS concern is primarily application-layer sophistication; Imperva's Layer 7 protection exists but the real competitive edge is raw speed on the attacks that actually cause downtime.