To see how Incapsula and CloudFlare compared performance wise I’ve set up two identical pages, one going through Incapsula and the other through CloudFlare, and tested them with various online tools.
From my tests CloudFlare appears to be much faster for the first few resources, but the last few resources seem take much longer to load (See Pingdom results for an example). Incapsula is slightly slower but unlike CloudFlare it’s speed is much more consistent with all the resources leading to very similar load times.
Loads.in results:
WebPageTest.org results:
Each test was run 3 times with both First View and Repeat View and the average taken.
Pingdom results:
Screenshot of one of the Pindom results:
Incapsula Results
CloudFlare Results
Site-Perf.com results:
FreeSiteStatus.com results:
Site24X7.com results:
Uptime results
The uptime checking services that only monitored in one or two locations or where the check interval was quite large ~30 minutes all reported 100% uptime. The two sites which had a shorter check interval reported outages with both Incapsula and CloudFlare.
FreeSiteStatus.com reported a 1 minute outage with both Incapsula and CloudFlare at different times. Site24X7.com reported 1 outage with Incapsula which lasted 5mins 14secs and 9 outages with CloudFlare totalling 58 minutes 16 seconds!
I was around during 2 of the 9 CloudFlare outages and I was able to verify that it was actually down and not a problem with the monitoring site. I also checked it wasn’t due to the test sites configuration by checking another site I use CloudFlare with as well as a couple of sites which I know use CloudFlare. All of which were down meaning it must of been a CloudFlare issue. Each outage didn’t seem to affect all locations or last too long.
Site24X7.com downtime reports are available here: CloudFlare’s Downtime Report (PDF) Incapsula’s Downtime Report (PDF)
Conclusion
The uptime problems with CloudFlare may have just be down to a bad week. I have however experienced some outages with CloudFlare before when I wasn’t monitoring them so I think these results may be reasonable accurate. The only way to be certain would be to monitor CloudFlare for at least a few months and see how well they do. None of the outages affected all locations though and seemed to affect none US locations more than US ones.
The performance of Incapsula and CloudFlare is about the same overall. However CloudFlare is very fast for the first few resources, so I think using CloudFlare with a separate CDN would give the best performance. If uptime is the most important factor, I would say Incapsula would be the better choice.
As always though the only way to really choose is to try both and see which is better for you.