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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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Barracuda Web Application F...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (16th)
HAProxy
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th), Bot Management (9th), Service Mesh (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Shahzad Abid - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."
"It's very user-friendly."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The UI is good."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"Parameter Protection is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Web Application Firewall include advanced bot protection, DDoS protection, and addressing the top ten vulnerabilities."
"The solution has been quite stable. It's reliable."
"The most valuable feature is the rule set."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic content filtering."
"Has a good dashboard."
"It's very simple and predictable, because Barracuda provides a vision of the current state of your application. It gives you an understanding of what is happening on your site and any attempts against you at your source. This is the main value that Web Application Firewall provides our company. These aspects are also the main reason for this documentation process."
"Setup of this solution is straightforward. It's a stable and scalable solution, with good performance and fast technical support."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is that it works for my use case of application load balancing. I'm using it for PeerSense, and it's easy enough for PeerSense."
"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."
"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."
"Scalable and inexpensive."
"It is scalable."
"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."
 

Cons

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Support response time could be improved."
"Technical support is lacking."
"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 have to go to an individual obligation, make changes, and come out, and go to the next obligation and make the same changes. There is no grouping option."
"I have issues with the load balancing of the solution which is slow. The connection pooling in Barracuda also doesn't work. There is an issue when someone needs access to a site quickly. The issue is with HTTPS services. I am not sure if they have changed all these in the solution’s latest version."
"Its interface can be better. It is not very friendly."
"I would like to see an improved capacity to store logs so that they will be available for a longer time."
"While the UI is good, it can get a little bit complicated."
"There are issues when upgrading firewalls and we experience different issues across customers."
"They should improve their features, so they easily compare to the competition."
"There are false positives that I am receiving when compared to other WAFs. The issues with false positives affect client transactions, leading to complaints about blocked transactions."
"There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment."
"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."
"The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source."
"​It needs proper HTTP/2 support.​"
"The product does not have any new technologies."
"Improving the documentation with multiple examples and scenarios would be beneficial. Most users encounter similar situations, so having a variety of scenarios readily available on the tool's website would be helpful. For instance, if I were part of the HAProxy team, I'd create a webpage with different scenarios and provide files for each scenario. This way, users wouldn't have to start from scratch every time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The price is reasonable."
"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."
"We are using the free version."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"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."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"Our licensing fees are paid annually and the cost is between €600 and €800 (approximately $665.00 to $885.00 USD)."
"The product is inexpensive."
"The product is expensive."
"The price of the solution is a little expensive. There is a license for this solution and it can be purchased every one, two, or five years."
"The price is reasonable, more so than other products."
"Cost is a bit on the higher side. Big companies can afford it."
"They only offer a yearly licensing plan."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"HAProxy is an open-source solution."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."
"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"HAProxy is free open-source software."
"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."
"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise15
 

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...
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...
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.
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?
Our experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been quite straightforward. Since we use the open-source ...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
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: September 2025.
873,209 professionals have used our research since 2012.