AWS WAF vs HAProxy comparison

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AWS WAF

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between AWS WAF and HAProxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS WAF vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: February 2026).

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AWS WAF vs. HAProxy

February 2026

Helped 881,733 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score

6.9

AWS WAF enhances security and cost efficiency by integrating with AWS, reducing the need for additional security personnel.

Sentiment score

7.1

HAProxy's open-source load balancer cuts costs, boosts efficiency, improves uptime, reduces staffing, and enhances scalability for users.

With AWS WAF, it is easier for us to block unwanted malicious DDoS attacks and threats from coming into our web application.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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%.

Head of DevOps at TripFactory

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Customer Service

Sentiment score

6.7

AWS WAF support receives mixed reviews, praised for responsiveness and expertise, yet criticized for cost and inconsistent communication.

Sentiment score

6.5

HAProxy's customer service and technical support are highly rated for quick, expert assistance, though documentation could improve.

Resolving issues can take time because the support personnel may lack product expertise, leading to delays.

Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

They reach out when you send them a ticket, and within 24 hours or less, someone is able to get back to you to solve your problem.

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DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.8

AWS WAF excels in scalability and auto-scaling, efficiently handling traffic for businesses of all sizes, though improvements are possible.

Sentiment score

7.9

HAProxy efficiently handles scalability, easily adapting configurations for growing traffic, ideal for small to medium businesses and larger environments.

AWS WAF does scale in the sense that it is fully managed and has automatic scaling.

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DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.

Head of DevOps at TripFactory

HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.

Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.3

AWS WAF is highly rated for stability due to reliable performance, strong protection, and effective redundancy features.

Sentiment score

8.1

HAProxy is reliable, handles heavy traffic efficiently, with minimal downtime, quick support, and frequent updates enhancing stability and performance.

Since it protects web applications from common attacks such as SQL injection and XSS, it is very stable.

DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of reliability, I would rate AWS WAF about six out of ten due to the need for improved signature sets.

Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We faced issues with AWS WAF when writing the custom rules.

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Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.

Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.

Sanooj Mananot

CEo at CloudPositive

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Head of DevOps at TripFactory

Room For Improvement

AWS WAF requires improved integration, usability, security features, and flexible pricing to better support global users and services.

HAProxy needs a revamped GUI, improved APIs, better AWS integration, real-time config, enhanced docs, and stronger monitoring and security.

Compared to firewalls, WAFs generally provide limited stateful analysis capabilities.

Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information.

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Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

Features like bot protection or DDoS mitigation, available with other WAF vendors, do not come natively with AWS WAF.

Kavin Kalaiarasu

Security Analyst at M2P Fintech

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.

Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.

reviewer2774310

DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Setup Cost

AWS WAF offers cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing, starting at $5 monthly, valued for integration with AWS services.

Enterprise users value HAProxy's competitive pricing and cost-effective licensing, especially compared to F5 and Citrix, despite initial setup costs.

Due to our status as an AWS shop, AWS WAF is cost-effective for us, and we benefit from discounts due to our extensive use of AWS services.

Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The licensing cost for AWS WAF is just pay-as-you-go; it is a service-based model.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

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.

Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.

reviewer2774310

DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Valuable Features

AWS WAF offers threat blocking, scalability, automation, and seamless integration, enhancing security and performance with easy deployment and affordability.

Users praise HAProxy for reliable load balancing, customization, low latency, open-source benefits, and advanced features like secure traffic management.

The biggest benefit of AWS WAF for us is to filter malicious requests, so we can protect our environment and application from malicious actors.

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

It has also helped to improve the posture of our application, prevent all DDoS attacks, and unnecessary traffic and SQL injection that is reducing the performance of our application.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The cloud-native nature of AWS is crucial since most of our workload is in AWS, making AWS WAF native to Amazon Web Services.

Kavin Kalaiarasu

Security Analyst at M2P Fintech

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.

Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

Sanooj Mananot

CEo at CloudPositive

Categories and Ranking

AWS WAF

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HAProxy

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

14th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (7th), Service Mesh (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of AWS WAF is 5.6%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 2.5%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
AWS WAF	5.6%
HAProxy	2.5%
Other	91.9%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Has successfully filtered malicious traffic and allowed country-specific access controls

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

For improvement in AWS WAF, we can have better monitoring. One of the things that should be improved in AWS WAF is the monitoring; we need to identify the requests and where they are coming from. If it's a bot, we should differentiate the requests, whether they are automated or not. The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information. We also need a feature where we can filter specific requests. If there are scripts in the requests, we should be able to filter those requests to see if there are any scripts running from them.

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Handles high traffic efficiently and simplifies complex routing with rule-based logic

Head of DevOps at TripFactory

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.

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See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	16

Questions from the Community

What are the limitations of AWS WAF vs alternative WAFs?

Hi Varun, I have had experienced with several WAF deployments and deep technical assessments of the following: 1. Imperva WAF 2. F5 WAF 3. Polarisec Cloud WAF Typical limitations on cloud WAF is t...

How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft Azure Application Gateway web application firewall software was the better fit ...

What do you like most about AWS WAF?

The most valuable feature of AWS WAF is its highly configurable rules system.

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.

Imperva Application Security Platform vs AWS WAF

Comparisons

Compared 9% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs AWS WAF

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs AWS WAF

Compared 7% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs AWS WAF

Compared 6% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs AWS WAF

Compared 5% of the time

More AWS WAF Competitors

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Download AWS WAF product report

AWS WAF

February 2026

Download HAProxy product report

January 2026

Also Known As

AWS Web Application Firewall

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a firewall security system that monitors incoming and outgoing traffic for applications and websites based on your pre-defined web security rules. AWS WAF defends applications and websites from common Web attacks that could otherwise damage application performance and availability and compromise security.

You can create rules in AWS WAF that can include blocking specific HTTP headers, IP addresses, and URI strings. These rules prevent common web exploits, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting. Once defined, new rules are deployed within seconds, and can easily be tracked so you can monitor their effectiveness via real-time insights. These saved metrics include URIs, IP addresses, and geo locations for each request.

AWS WAF Features

Some of the solution's top features include:

Web traffic filtering: Get an extra layer of security by creating a centralized set of rules, easily deployable across multiple websites. These rules filter out web traffic based on conditions like HTTP headers, URIs, and IP addresses. This is very helpful for protection against exploits such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting as well as attacks from third-party applications.

Bot control: Malicious bot traffic can consume excessive resources and cause downtime. Gain visibility and control over bot traffic with a managed rule group. You can easily block harmful bots, such as scrapers and crawlers, and you can allow common bots, like search engines and status monitors.

Fraud prevention: Effectively defend your application against bot attacks by monitoring your application’s login page with a managed rule group that prevents hackers from accessing user accounts using compromised credentials. The managed rule group helps protect against credential stuffing attacks, brute-force login attempts, and other harmful login activities.

API for AWS WAF Management: Automatically create and maintain rules and integrate them into your development process.

Metrics for real-time visibility: Receive real-time metrics and captures of raw requests with details about geo-locations, IP addresses, URIs, user agents, and referrers. Integrate seamlessly with Amazon CloudWatch to set up custom alarms when events or attacks occur. These metrics provide valuable data intelligence that can be used to create new rules that significantly improve your application protections.

Firewall management: AWS Firewall Manager automatically scans and notifies the security team when there is a policy violation, so they can swiftly take action. When new resources are created, your security team can guarantee that they comply with your organization’s security rules.

Reviews from Real Users

AWS WAF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its user-friendly interface and its integration capabilities.

Kavin K., a security analyst at M2P Fintech, writes, “I believe the most impressive features are integration and ease of use. The best part of AWS WAF is the cloud-native WAF integration. There aren't any hidden deployments or hidden infrastructure which we have to maintain to have AWS WAF. AWS maintains everything; all we have to do is click the button, and WAF will be activated. Any packet coming through the internet will be filtered through.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

HAProxy One: This is a next-gen end-to-end application delivery platform created to secure and streamline modern application architectures. It offers a complete suite of solutions, such as application delivery software, turnkey, and appliance services observed and administered through a central control plane. The product supplies application acceleration, CDN, DDoS, bot management, WAF capabilities, and load balancing.

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane: This product enables organizations to streamline workflows, arrange traffic routing and security protocols, enhance the speed of delivery, and scale out of the organization’s applications. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane offers an intuitive user interface to observe and control the complete product lineup and API for administering numerous fleets of HAProxy Enterprise servers, either in the cloud or on premises.

HAProxy Edge: This product offering is an application delivery network (ADN) that provides a broad array of turnkey application services with amazing scale and complete visibility. Services include application and content acceleration, advanced security, and load balancing.

HAProxy ALOHA Hardware or Virtual Load Balancer: This product is a virtual load balancer or plug-and-play hardware constructed upon HAProxy Enterprise that is designed to support proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7. It has a user-friendly GUI, simple deployment, and no limit on backend servers, making it a complete product for organizations desiring a reliable system to provide high-end load distribution for critical services.

HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller: This product is designed to facilitate smooth traffic flow into a Kubernetes cluster. It is able to automatically discover anomalies and changes in an organization's Kubernetes infrastructure and provide precise distribution of traffic to healthy pods, with no downtime caused by poor pod health or scaling changes. The product comes with an embedded WAF to optimize the security of an organization’s applications running in Kubernetes.

HAProxy Enterprise: This product is the enterprise-class edition of HAProxy offering a dynamic and sturdy code base with next-generation features, an enterprise suite of add-ons, professional services, and trusted support.
- Cluster-wide tracking and rate limiting
- Advanced DDoS and bot management
- Web application firewall
- Reliable expert support
- High performance modules
- Device detection and geolocation
- Real-time dashboard

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.

Sample Customers

eVitamins, 9Splay, Senao International

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp