

Find out in this report how the two Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
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.
The technical support team is very effective in resolving issues.
Although the team is good, they are not fast, and they lack the skills to manage dynamic attackers.
Support for Arbor DDoS deserves a rating of 10 because when there is a problem with implementation, the people I work with are the best.
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.
This would enhance the knowledge about scalability options available for Arbor DDoS, making it more accessible and useful for users.
They need to purchase boxes monthly to expand their bandwidths, and these new boxes can be added to the installed base very easily.
I find Arbor DDoS to be very scalable.
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.
It is a very stable product.
Arbor DDoS is very stable.
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 like to see an option to decrypt the traffic with Arbor DDoS, as some clients are interested in this, particularly for application layer attacks on port 443.
Enhancing the handshakes between Arbor DDoS and third-party solutions is essential for obtaining better and real-time data that supports any organization’s support team effectively.
I would like to see a roadmap for one or two years, and it is tough to predict what will happen in that timeframe without a clearer description.
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.
The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive.
For some customers, the cost is expensive, but for enterprises looking to protect their services, it is affordable.
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.
That is an attack over 10 gigabit per second, and if an attack enters the telecommunication network, that will be a disaster for their customer, their services, and so on.
We have many updates for the library of different attacks, and they have artificial intelligence that automatically learns the process during different attacks.
The platform offers quick mitigation of attacks because Arbor DDoS uses BGP Flowspec, enabling very quick mitigation.
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 | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Arbor DDoS | 9.8% |
| HAProxy | 1.5% |
| Other | 88.7% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 25 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 14 |
| Large Enterprise | 29 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
Arbor DDoS offers a comprehensive defense system against DDoS attacks, integrating a user-friendly GUI and advanced threat mitigation technologies for enhanced network protection.
Arbor DDoS is recognized for its ability to manage high-volume DDoS attacks efficiently, providing extensive protection through real-time traffic analysis and automated threat detection. It utilizes advanced techniques such as blackhole and BGP Flowspec for effective threat management. Arbor's cloud signaling allows users to handle and mitigate volumetric attacks while maintaining service availability. Though it provides robust security features, users note potential improvements in auto-mitigation, scalability, and AI integration. Challenges like an outdated graphical interface, hardware stability, and false positives need addressing to further enhance its usability and integration with third-party systems.
What are the key features of Arbor DDoS?Internet service providers and telecom companies commonly adopt Arbor DDoS to protect their networks and infrastructure from DDoS attacks. It is also implemented in financial and government sectors to ensure web application security and maintain high availability. Arbor DDoS supports a hybrid approach, utilizing both on-premise and cloud solutions to manage traffic efficiently and sustain service quality during attacks.
HAProxy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the fastest and most popular and trusted software load balancer products in the marketplace today. Organizations are able to immediately deploy HAProxy solutions to enable websites and applications to optimize performance, security, and observability. HAProxy solutions are available to scale to any environment.
HAProxy is an open-source product and has a robust, active, reliable community. The solutions are continually tested and improved on by the community. HAProxy offers a dynamic design to support the most modern architectures, microservices, and deployment environments (appliances, containers, virtual, and cloud).
HAProxy utilizes a cloud-native protocol, which makes it a complete solution for cloud services such as Red Hat OpenShift, OVH, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more. It also can be used as the reference load balancer in OpenStack.
HAProxy Products
Reviews from Real Users
“Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind.” - Nathanel S., Platform Architect at SES
“I use HAProxy for individuals who can not buy low balancers. I built NFV in a box and send individuals a pathway into an HAProxy VM. The setup was not difficult; it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC. When it comes to pricing, HAProxy is free.” - Nasir O., Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.
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