

Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
Aikido Security caught a critical remote code execution vulnerability in my Python machine learning pipelines before it reached production.
Since we got rid of that, our productivity has increased, I believe, by thirty-two percent.
We were expecting to complete the compliance in a month, but I figured out Aikido Security could do it within a week for all our 13 repositories.
Operational efficiency has improved; we no longer have staff consistently monitoring backend servers during deployment or scaling events, as HAProxy's health checks and hitless reloads allow us to push changes with minimal manual intervention.
This resulted in a drastic decrease in costs and, at the same time, the accuracy of the hits coming on HAProxy was almost around 100% or 99.99%.
I estimate seeing a return on investment with HAProxy, as it significantly reduced staff requirements and enhanced scaling capabilities, particularly when transitioning from NGINX, which faced issues.
Aikido Security was the easiest to use, the easiest to onboard, and the one with the most active customer support.
Their team proactively reached out after signup to ensure we were set up correctly.
Customer support is good; if you raise a query, hardly within a day, your issues get resolved.
Since we are utilizing the open-source edition, community forums, mailing lists, and GitHub have been invaluable, with typically someone having encountered the same problems we faced.
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
That kind of reliability becomes invisible when it works well, which is exactly what you want from a security tool running in your CI/CD pipelines.
Aikido Security scales well by supporting multiple projects, repositories, and development teams on a single platform.
You can deploy it on your team, and if you have a large team, it works very well.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
The platform has been reliable and provides accurate security findings.
It remains stable even when generating a large amount of code.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
We have reduced a lot of servers, replacing them with one or two HAProxy servers which deliver better performance, accuracy, and an almost 100% success rate with requests.
I would love to see a Terraform module for Aikido Security.
I had a certain object with a UUID that was being considered as a private secret key or API key, which was not the case.
Aikido Security tells you what is vulnerable, but sometimes the fix suggestions are generic.
The configuration syntax is powerful yet can become overwhelming for newcomers; a more beginner-friendly interface or a native GUI without relying on third-party tools would ease the onboarding process.
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
I used the free trial, which was sufficient for evaluating the platform and its core features.
Aikido Security has a plan for $4,200 annually for up to 10 users.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing is reasonable and based on the repository; they charge accordingly.
Since we use the open-source edition, there are no licensing fees, with the main cost being the infrastructure running on EC2 instances in AWS, which helps maintain low expenses.
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
We were able to get all codebase vulnerability fixes within a week for all our 13 or 14 repositories that we had.
Security shifted left, meaning issues were caught during development rather than after deployment.
My favorite feature is the dependency vulnerability scanning because it quickly identifies the risk in third-party packages, which saves me time in finding vulnerabilities.
By moving all SSL termination to the load balancer, I now manage certificates in a single place, and I can also utilize Let's Encrypt with HAProxy's built-in ACME support, making renewal automatic.
HAProxy positively impacted our organization by exceeding scalability expectations, initially projected at 200k requests but ultimately handling over 15 million transactions per second without any issues.
As a production engineer at that time, I definitely wanted to ensure that the system could handle massive connections, especially since we operated an e-commerce platform where we could not lose any customer calls.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| HAProxy | 1.9% |
| Aikido Security | 0.4% |
| Other | 97.7% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 18 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
Aikido Security is the no-nonsense platform that empowers developers by centralizing code-to-cloud security issues and providing rapid guidance for fixing vulnerabilities.
With over 6,000 teams utilizing its features, Aikido Security prioritizes effective security management by consolidating 11 comprehensive scans into one platform. This approach translates complex vulnerabilities into understandable insights, targeting non-enterprise SaaS businesses with engineering teams of 10-500 developers. It focuses on delivering security management without excessive costs or complexity through a product-led growth model.
What are the standout features of Aikido Security?In industries like software development and cloud services, Aikido Security is implemented to provide clear insights, enabling teams to focus on rapid product growth while maintaining robust security. Its product-led growth strategy, including a freemium offering, allows developers to experience benefits firsthand without initial investment.
HAProxy delivers reliability, high performance, and efficient load balancing solutions. Its open-source model ensures cost-effectiveness and scalability, ideal for managing extensive infrastructure demands with minimal latency while offering seamless integration with modern platforms.
HAProxy is renowned for its robust performance in load balancing across TCP and HTTP protocols, featuring multiple algorithms such as round-robin. Users appreciate its customizable configuration and seamless SSL termination, which make it an excellent choice for managing complex infrastructures. The platform's open-source nature supports scalability, reducing costs while providing flexible proxy operations. HAProxy efficiently handles high concurrency, enabling smooth traffic management and ensuring stability within diverse systems.
What key features does HAProxy offer?HAProxy is extensively used in load balancing implementations across various sectors. Companies deploy it for managing high traffic, Layer 4 and Layer 7 applications, and SQL databases. It supports microservices architecture, performs SSL offloading, and manages email services like SMTP. As a reverse proxy, HAProxy delivers high availability for systems like Redis, RabbitMQ, and Apache while integrating with Docker and Kubernetes. Its features enhance web application firewall capabilities and traffic routing, making it suitable for industries demanding reliable and efficient network management.
We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.