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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs HAProxy comparison

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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

Cloudflare Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Barracuda Web Application F...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
17th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
46
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
47
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 Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda Web Application Firewall is 2.0%, up from 2.0% 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
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall5.6%
HAProxy2.5%
Barracuda Web Application Firewall2.0%
Other89.9%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

AU
IT Manager at Amla Commerce
Effectively protects clients from automated threats and ensures global security
I cannot say much about areas of improvement for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall because I haven't gone through deep understanding of it, as I am still learning. However, they need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long. If I took 48 hours to answer a request at my company, it would be a tough time to see or address the issue, and it would be frustrating.
Shahzad Abid - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Information Technology at College of Physicians & Surgeons Pakistan
Has protected our legacy applications effectively but has required constant manual filtering due to false positives
I assess the effectiveness of the machine learning-driven threat detection in Barracuda Web Application Firewall as sometimes behaving abnormally, often showing me false positive attacks, so I have to fix these attacks from time to time. From a stability point of view, I would definitely rate Barracuda Web Application Firewall a seven out of ten. There is definitely some room for improvement; nothing is perfect in the world. I am not satisfied with the technical support from Barracuda. I am somewhat disappointed with the technical support that I have received so far. Whenever I generate a ticket for my problem, it goes to the Indian support team, and they all the time start with the most junior team member, consuming all my precious time. At the end, I have to close that ticket without any satisfactory solution. I have complained that they should shift my support to any other region because I don't need Indian support; they are simply pathetic and not up to mark. To improve Barracuda Web Application Firewall, customers should be given ongoing training opportunities regarding the product and its features. I am not familiar with many features that are available, only using those which are necessary for my applications. I believe Barracuda must provide clearer product information or training sessions to make it more user-friendly, as sometimes its interface can be rigid and lacking in helpful resources or user tutorials about its features. For it to get closer to a ten, I think advanced reporting is missing because, as I mentioned earlier, there are many false positive events being recorded. Often, when I analyze these attacks, they turn out to be genuine customers or users interacting with my product, but Barracuda tags them as attackers. Reducing false positives must be a priority.
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 initial setup process is simple."
"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."
"The updating and signature features are my primary use case for the solution. These features are beneficial to my organization."
"Setup of this solution is straightforward. It's a stable and scalable solution, with good performance and fast technical support."
"The customer service and support are exceptional, and I would give them a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the signature base."
"We only need one subscription to be protected against both active DDoS and offline DDoS attacks."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Web Application Firewall include advanced bot protection, DDoS protection, and addressing the top ten vulnerabilities."
"It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs in our environment."
"The most valuable features are the client VPN and content filtering."
"We definitely saw fewer employees needed and money saved; we achieved 100% money savings and fewer employees with very little maintenance required."
"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."
"The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."
"Stability is number one."
"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."
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."
"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."
 

Cons

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"There are false positives that I am receiving when compared to other WAFs."
"I would like to see a native multi-cloud cover."
"I have found F5 more stable than Barracuda Web Application Firewall. They should improve the stability."
"As a service, Barracuda needs to host in Saudi Arabia, as they currently don't have this functionality."
"The policy updates could be improved."
"The GUI needs to be improved because it sometimes hangs and needs to be restarted."
"In the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, there should be more affordable options for WAF as a service."
"Its interface can be better. It is not very friendly."
"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"An alerting system would be better as I need to check log files if any backend is down."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
"The solution can be improved by controlling TCP behavior better and mandating to clients what the expected outcome must be in order to avoid receiving contestant timeout logs."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved."
"The visibility could be improved."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"The solution is expensive."
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."
"While I would have to check on the price of the solution, I feel it to be okay and it matches the market price."
"Cost is a bit on the higher side. Big companies can afford it."
"The product pricing was competitive for the value it offers regarding security features."
"The product is expensive."
"Our licensing fees are paid annually and the cost is between €600 and €800 (approximately $665.00 to $885.00 USD)."
"They have competitive pricing."
"The product is inexpensive."
"HAProxy is an open-source solution."
"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."
"The product is open source."
"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."
"The tool is open-source."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
"HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
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 Business15
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't really use the rule-based logic feature or utilize the WAF's ability to scale as a cloud-based service. I don...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I'm using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall on all my domains and any client domains I have; I set them up with a C...
What do you like most about Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
I am not using the API protection feature right now because I don't host any APIs through Barracuda Web Application F...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
At the time I was acquiring Barracuda Web Application Firewall, I found it costly compared to other products. To over...
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...
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

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar
Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,180 professionals have used our research since 2012.