Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs HAProxy comparison

Barracuda Networks and HAProxy are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #34 with an average rating of 6.0, while HAProxy is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.6. Additionally, 75% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of HAProxy users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service 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 Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy

September 2025

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Helped 867,783 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:

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch

Engineer at SITMEXICO

Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients

It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.

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Hadar Eshel

Co-Founder and CEO at Cloudway

Easy to install platform with valuable policy management features

We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy. Additionally, it could operate in a local data center.…

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Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

More Cloudflare pros

"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."

"It provides an ease of policy management."

"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"

"I like its ability to identify known attacks, including DDOS attacks. It's valuable because software must be able to stop known attacks. Application attacks are evolving all the time. When it comes to software-as-a-service, we need to have software that knows about all the latest attacks. It should also protect against major unknown attacks."

"The most valuable features of the solution are it is plug and play, has automated policies, a simple configuration, and is easy to create rules."

"Advanced traffic rules, including stick tables and ACLs, which allow me to shape traffic while it's load balanced."

"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."

"The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."

"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."

"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."

"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."

"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."

"It solves a problem for me where I can build files, not based on the health of the check, but rather the speed of the check."

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

More Cloudflare cons

"We found it a bit slow when accessing it through the web browser. The URL also exposed the user name and the hashed password. When I log into my Barracuda WAF user portal, I could see the username and the hashed password on the URL itself. So, it is not very secure, and it is important to take that off."

"The solution can improve by bundling Security Operation Center (SOC) with the WAF-as-a-Service, it would provide a lot more value to customers."

"It's a very specific solution that is only requested for a customer's web code or their global IT policy."

"The stability of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy."

"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."

"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."

"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."

"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."

"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."

"They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers. Also, they need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration."

"The configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer."

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It's very difficult for me to give an estimate of the cost. All I know is that we sell the box itself as a service."

"The product is expensive but it offers flexible pricing. It could be affordable."

"I rate the product's price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high. There are no additional costs to be paid apart from the standard licensing fees attached to the solution."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."

"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."

"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

"The product is open source."

"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."

"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

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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

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Media Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	45
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	25

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What do you like most about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

It provides an ease of policy management.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strateg...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 84% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 16% of the time

More Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service Competitors

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

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

Compared 10% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

September 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

August 2025

Download Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service product report

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

September 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Barracuda WAF as a Service

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is a comprehensive solution designed to provide application security, DDoS protection, SSL authentication, protocol support, and application delivery. It is a plug-and-play solution with automated policies, simple configuration, and easy rule creation.

The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system based on email protection with cloud security. It is also a web application firewall and covers major protection and threat management functions. With Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, customers can ensure the security of their web code and comply with global IT policies.

Barracuda Networks

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.

HAProxy

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Salvation Army

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

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy

September 2025

Free Report: Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy

Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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