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Akamai Bot Manager vs HAProxy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Bot Manager
Ranking in Bot Management
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HAProxy
Ranking in Bot Management
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (12th), Service Mesh (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Bot Management category, the mindshare of Akamai Bot Manager is 22.0%, up from 21.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 0.5%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Bot Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Akamai Bot Manager22.0%
HAProxy0.5%
Other77.5%
Bot Management
 

Featured Reviews

Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a good user experience and has a straightforward initial setup phase
The features of the tool are associated with the licensing part, so my company uses Akamai Bot Manager for account takeovers. The aforementioned area consists of functionality related to the product, which is available straight out of the box. The product is very straightforward. One of the features of the product is associated with the fact that it allows us to automate the blocking of countries, like Russia, that have some serious criminal records or where the crimes are high, so my company uses IP geo protection as a function. VPNs from areas that are used by some bots to potentially launch attacks are blocked by automating certain processes through Akamai. Akamai has a database of blacklisted IPs, URLs, and users.
Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks
What I like best about the product is its simplicity and speed. When you need to set up a load balancer quickly, HAProxy offers options like sticky sessions and round-robin. It's also fast to configure, including adding SSL for security. While it may have fewer options than other solutions like F5, HAProxy gets the job done for basic load-balancing tasks. The reliability features of HAProxy were particularly useful in a scenario where I needed to test load balancing between two Tomcats. Since these domains were inaccessible, I set up a third Docker with HAProxy, which had access to the Tomcat domains. I then configured HAProxy to handle the load balancing. This setup allowed the client to interact with HAProxy. The solution's integration with other elements is easy.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Akamai Bot Manager has two valuable features: BMS (Bot Manager Standard) and BMP (Bot Manager Premier)."
"Based on the telemetry, Akamai Bot Manager gives a rough estimate of all the hits and requests we get, which are suspected bots."
"Akamai Bot Manager has more advanced rules that allow it to detect and block bot scrapers."
"The best feature is the BNP. That is what Manager Premium does, protection of transactional endpoints."
"Akamai Bot Manager is very easy to scale. Adding new domains or subdomains is a super easy process."
"The most valuable features of Akamai Bot Manager are the seamless integration and accuracy with which it detects the bots that can make attacks."
"In terms of the security provided, the benefits from the use of the product are immediately visible."
"The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB-algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"The features I find valuable in this solution are session control which automatically disconnects users that forget to log off, and the ability to write rules to either allow or block certain file requests."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"Stability is number one."
"The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."
 

Cons

"We cannot block illegitimate web scrapers because Akamai Bot Manager does not provide detailed information about various origins and remote VPNs they come through."
"Akamai Bot Manager can improve by having better SDK integration. SDK would be required to integrate with any mobile applications and if they are able to make that more seamless, it will help."
"I feel that customer support has certain concerns where improvements are required."
"There are other rules that are user-friendly, however, many of the things have a learning curve. This is not something you enter into lightly."
"There is a clear need for improvement. Over the past year or so, we've observed an increase in the sophistication of attacks, with some occurring at the start of this year or even extending back one and a half years. Despite having ample resources, particularly with the advent of advanced AI, these entities can now execute basic bot attacks."
"I would say there is definitely a need of improvement because I think some start of this year or even, like one and a half years. But now have enough resources at their end especially with the, advanced AI and everything. So they have enough resources to launch basic bot attacks. And whenever we do some type of fine tuning, they are always somehow able to evade it or just fly under the threshold. And from our end, we also have to maintain those threshold so that we still do not start blocking the real general customer. So every time when they try to do something else, we have to see their traffic patterns and then find you in our solution.When these bot attacks happen, what we have to do is we have to check their, traffic patterns, their IT sees and then do the proper analysis. And based on that, the fine tuning is done. So I would say, like, based on these bot traffic, if there is a automatic fine tuning. With the help of machine learning at all, then that would be much more easier of beneficial. So this needs improvement."
"In my opinion, the UI of Akamai Bot Manager is a bit unconventional and not as intuitive as one might expect."
"Akamai Bot Manager Premier has some additional functionalities, particularly for web telemetry, but they don't have it for app telemetry."
"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs."
"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."
"There are three main areas to improve: 1) Make remote management more modern by adding API. 2) Propose a general HA ​solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this). 3) Thread option should be a bit more stable."
"The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved."
"Improving the documentation with multiple examples and scenarios would be beneficial. Most users encounter similar situations, so having a variety of scenarios readily available on the tool's website would be helpful. For instance, if I were part of the HAProxy team, I'd create a webpage with different scenarios and provide files for each scenario. This way, users wouldn't have to start from scratch every time."
"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."
"The visibility could be improved."
"The web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You buy a license of the product based on a certain volume, but if you hit the volume and go above it, then you are charged additional for each GB you use. I think you need to pay 20,000 per month."
"Akamai Bot Manager requires a separate license that sits on top of Kona or Akamai Web Application Protector."
"Akamai Bot Manager is a very expensive solution."
"We have to pay a bundled cost."
"The price of Akamai Bot Manager could improve."
"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."
"The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."
"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."
"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."
"HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."
"It is free of cost."
"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Akamai Bot Manager?
The best feature is the BNP. That is what Manager Premium does, protection of transactional endpoints.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Bot Manager?
You buy a license of the product based on a certain volume, but if you hit the volume and go above it, then you are charged additional for each GB you use. I think you need to pay 20,000 per month.
What needs improvement with Akamai Bot Manager?
In terms of the need for improvement, I feel that it is a continuous cycle where Akamai keeps updating the databases. There are new emerging threats, risks, and sources from which threats can emerg...
Do you recommend HAProxy?
I do recommend HAProxy for more simple applications or for companies with a low budget, since HAProxy is a free, open-source product. HAProxy is also a good choice for someone looking for a stable ...
What do you like most about HAProxy?
The solution is effective in managing our traffic.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Luisa Via Roma, Gymgrossisten, Rakuten, U.S. News & World Report, Japan Airlines
Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Imperva, Akamai and others in Bot Management. Updated: August 2025.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.