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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
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HAProxy
Ranking in Bot Management
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Service Mesh (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Bot Management category, the mindshare of Akamai Bot Manager is 14.7%, up from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 1.9%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Bot Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Akamai Bot Manager14.7%
HAProxy1.9%
Other83.4%
Bot Management
 

Featured Reviews

Denis Burnaev - PeerSpot reviewer
SecOps Engineer at El Al
Uses real-time dashboards to manage bot traffic and has provided a reliable first layer of defense
Because we are an airline, we have various attacks on our website and application, and we really have to involve our experience and try to find attacks by ourselves. These days attacks are very sophisticated and they are trying to manipulate in the same way as humans, so the anomaly feature is not really helpful. Bots are very clever these days and they move through the website the way humans do. We are not really using it because again, the attacks are sophisticated. We need something that involves different AI models that can try to find similarity in all the data that we are getting from Akamai Bot Manager to understand where exactly we can find similarities between the ways bots are reacting on the website. The most valued feature these days is getting research on all the data as fast as possible and trying to find similarities to understand which bots are trying to manipulate or abuse my website. We are going toward AI solutions because it is the fastest, but it should be a very sophisticated model. Bots these days move the way humans do, so it's really hard to understand which of them is a bot and which is human. Bots can go through the challenges you are putting on the website, and it seems nothing can stop them.
Shrinivas Devarkonda - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
Handles high traffic efficiently and simplifies complex routing with rule-based logic
I think HAProxy is good as it stands now, but I believe there could be improvements. gRPC has recently been implemented, which is great, along with TLS 1.2 and 1.3 support, and HTTP 2.0 is also available. However, I'm unsure about the benchmark of those HTTP 2.0 requests on HAProxy. If there were any other protocol with better performance than HTTP 2.0, or perhaps mTLS and other similar features, including that in HAProxy would be really great. For improvements, I think that during setup and configuration, the steps provided are neat and clear. Anyone can easily install and configure it. There are many kernel tuning parameters also available, which is great. For specific improvement, in terms of logging, I think printing the full object of the request may help, or if there's a way to reference two requests, it would be beneficial to find a complete session history from a logged-in customer, as it would help analyze customer and user analytics.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Akamai Bot Manager are the seamless integration and accuracy with which it detects the bots that can make attacks."
"Akamai Bot Manager is very easy to scale. Adding new domains or subdomains is a super easy process."
"Akamai Bot Manager is helping us understand how many bots are accessing our websites or applications, and we can manage the dashboard to differentiate on a quick view and see how much good bots get access compared to bad bots trying to reach our website."
"Akamai Bot Manager has more advanced rules that allow it to detect and block bot scrapers."
"Based on the telemetry, Akamai Bot Manager gives a rough estimate of all the hits and requests we get, which are suspected bots."
"The best feature is the BNP. That is what Manager Premium does, protection of transactional endpoints."
"Akamai Bot Manager has two valuable features: BMS (Bot Manager Standard) and BMP (Bot Manager Premier)."
"In terms of the security provided, the benefits from the use of the product are immediately visible."
"We achieved 100% money savings and fewer employees with very little maintenance required."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"HAProxy has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to manage configurations; I put configuration files on the Ceph storage shared across the whole cluster, allowing me to write my configuration, change it easily in one place, and reload it."
"It is scalable."
"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."
"The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
 

Cons

"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."
"In my opinion, the UI of Akamai Bot Manager is a bit unconventional and not as intuitive as one might expect."
"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."
"The anomaly feature is not really helpful. Bots are very clever these days and they move through the website the way humans do."
"Akamai Bot Manager Premier has some additional functionalities, particularly for web telemetry, but they don't have it for app telemetry."
"I feel that customer support has certain concerns where improvements are required."
"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."
"We cannot block illegitimate web scrapers because Akamai Bot Manager does not provide detailed information about various origins and remote VPNs they come through."
"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."
"The visibility could be improved."
"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."
"The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved."
 

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 is a very expensive solution."
"Akamai Bot Manager requires a separate license that sits on top of Kona or Akamai Web Application Protector."
"The price of Akamai Bot Manager could improve."
"We have to pay a bundled cost."
"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."
"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."
"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."
"The product is open source."
"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Bot Manager?
Akamai Bot Manager is not cheap. From what I know, Akamai Bot Manager is not so cheap.
What needs improvement with Akamai Bot Manager?
Because we are an airline, we have various attacks on our website and application, and we really have to involve our experience and try to find attacks by ourselves. These days attacks are very sop...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Bot Manager?
I'm working at an airline company, so Akamai Bot Manager has been used in our company for approximately 20 years.
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?
Since we used the open-source version, we were not concerned about pricing, setup cost, or licensing.
 

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 Akamai Bot Manager vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.