WAF & DDoS Protection Services Market Share & Usage Statistics (2026)

A web application firewall filters HTTP traffic before it reaches a site, blocking attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting and malicious bots. Most cloud WAFs work as a reverse proxy: the domain points at the provider, which forwards clean traffic to the real server. We detect a WAF or DDoS protection service on about 240,000 live domains, led by Sucuri, DDoS-Guard and Imperva.

In our WAF and DDoS protection data, Sucuri leads with about 94,000 live domains, roughly 39%, just ahead of DDoS-Guard at about 38% and Imperva at about 12%. One caveat changes the picture: Cloudflare, which fronts far more sites than this whole category, is counted under CDN, and AWS WAF under bot detection. This ranking covers firewalls that identify themselves in their responses.

Cloudflare runs a WAF as part of its reverse-proxy network, alongside CDN, DNS and DDoS protection. We classify Cloudflare under CDN, where it's the largest provider we track, so it doesn't appear in our WAF and DDoS protection ranking. That's why Sucuri, at about 94,000 live domains, can top this category without protecting more of the web than Cloudflare does.

They serve different buyers. Sucuri, owned by GoDaddy, is a website firewall and malware cleanup service aimed at small sites; our crawl finds it on about 94,000 live domains, and nearly three in four keep DNS or email at GoDaddy. Imperva, owned by Thales since 2023, is an enterprise application security vendor, on about 29,000 domains here, with banks and insurers prominent among them. Both work as reverse proxies.

DDoS-Guard is a Russian company that sells DDoS protection, CDN and hosting. Our crawl identifies it on about 91,000 live domains from its Server response header, making it the second-largest provider in our WAF and DDoS protection data at about 38%. Its customers are concentrated in Russia and neighbouring markets, and it has drawn scrutiny for some of the sites it hosts.

Look at the response headers. Reverse-proxy firewalls usually sign what they send: Sucuri adds its own X-Sucuri headers, Imperva sends an X-CDN header naming Imperva or Incapsula plus an X-Iinfo header, and DDoS-Guard names itself in the Server header. A challenge page or a vendor cookie on first visit is another sign. Firewalls that strip their headers, or run inside the application, are much harder to spot.

A WAF inspects individual requests and blocks malicious ones, such as injection attempts or bad bots. DDoS protection absorbs floods of traffic meant to knock a site offline, often at the network layer. Most providers in our data, including Sucuri, DDoS-Guard and Imperva, sell both from the same proxy network, which is why we track them as one category of about 240,000 live domains.

It splits by buyer. Small-site firewalls such as Sucuri sell fixed annual plans in the low hundreds of dollars, while Imperva and Akamai are sold as enterprise contracts priced by traffic and the number of applications. Our data shows the same split: most of the companies matched to Sucuri domains employ ten people or fewer, while Imperva's matched customers skew toward banks and insurers.

SiteLock sells malware scanning and a firewall, but our crawl can't see which plans a site has switched on. What we count is the SiteLock trust seal: about 2,700 live domains display a working seal, after cleaning, which puts SiteLock at about 1% of our WAF and DDoS protection data. Treat that as sites advertising SiteLock, not as sites behind its firewall.