Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs HAProxy comparison

Barracuda Web Application F...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Barracuda Web Application Firewall 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 Web Application Firewall vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: December 2025).

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. HAProxy

December 2025

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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

Barracuda Web Application F...

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

17th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

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 January 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Barracuda Web Application Firewall is 2.1%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 2.6%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
HAProxy	2.6%
Barracuda Web Application Firewall	2.1%
Other	95.3%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Shahzad Abid

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.

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Shrinivas Devarkonda

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution ensures layer seven is secure from attacks."

"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 solution is user-friendly and easy to set up."

"The stability of the solution is good. I don't think we've experienced bugs, crashes, or glitches."

"We only need one subscription to be protected against both active DDoS and offline DDoS attacks."

"We use Barracuda to protect the application. That's the main feature we use it for."

"This product gives us visibility into what is going on in two servers, including connections and sessions, real-time alerts, very good reporting, and KPIs. It makes managing security of a critical server very easy, with a friendly GUI."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall pros

"I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime."

"It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors."

"Stability is number one."

"It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions."

"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 coming from customers or other sources, and there are no loopholes, disconnects, or gaps in the entire data flow."

"Scalable and inexpensive."

"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."

"Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development."

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"I would suggest that someone implementing this product is knowledgeable in the IT field, and with the network needs. It is complex."

"We get false positives about phishing emails."

"One of Barracuda's limitations is its user interface. The GUI for configuration is not intuitive and has remained largely unchanged for the past 10 to 12 years."

"We encountered a few glitches while implementing API security features into the product."

"I have found F5 more stable than Barracuda Web Application Firewall. They should improve the stability."

"The usability of the interface could be improved."

"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."

"Its interface can be better. It is not very friendly."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall cons

"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."

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

"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."

"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 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 web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible)."

"An alerting system would be better as I need to check log files if any backend is down."

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

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They only offer a yearly licensing plan."

"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."

"Our licensing fees are paid annually and the cost is between €600 and €800 (approximately $665.00 to $885.00 USD)."

"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."

"The product is inexpensive."

"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."

"Barracuda costs us $8,000 per year. Barracuda costs $20,000 for a full subscription, when you try to protect multi-site infrastructure, in different geographical zones and for different data centers. If you have only one site, Barracuda will be cheaper."

"The price is reasonable, more so than other products."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."

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

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

"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."

"It is free of cost."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."

"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

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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880,511 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

University

Manufacturing Company

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	25
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	11

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

Questions from the Community

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 in our environment.

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 Firewall. I use a second procedure for API, which is point-to-point VPN connectiv...

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 overcome that price factor, I excluded some features or subscriptions to align with ...

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.

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Comparisons

Compared 23% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Link11 vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall Competitors

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

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

Compared 11% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Barracuda Web Application Firewall

January 2026

Barracuda Web Application Firewall report

Download Barracuda Web Application Firewall product report

Download HAProxy product report

January 2026

Also Known As

No data available

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

Barracuda Web Application Firewall is a game-changing cloud-connected security solution that enables organizations to safeguard both their applications and their data from an ever-growing array of advanced cyber threats. It offers protection from cyber attacks that target not only data and applications stored on the cloud but also those that are housed on web servers. 43% of the time a breach takes place via a compromised application. Barracuda Web Application Firewall prevents these types of breaches from occurring.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall denies hackers the ability to penetrate your system by using a number of techniques to keep your organization safely insulated. The first method of protection consists of two parts. The first part involves a thorough scanning of all inbound web traffic. This solution monitors everything that comes into the system. It employs IP reputation intelligence, which filters all incoming data. If the source of the data has a bad reputation, it is blocked by the firewall. Administrators now have a way of locking out many common threats that could otherwise compromise sensitive networks. These scans can also allow administrators to protect their systems from within as DLP (Data Loss Prevention) protocols. If any sensitive data attempts to leave, administrators will automatically be alerted and the data will be blocked from exiting.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall can also be set up to apply the AAA (Authentication, Authorization & Accounting) framework to an organization’s network. If an intruder manages to get past the authentication stage, the authorization protocols kick in. After the authorization stage comes accounting, which works by tracking and logging users’ activities so that administrators will be in a position to prevent long-term damage from being done. This three-step process can be implemented without requiring administrators to make changes to their applications.

Key Features

Some of Barracuda Web Application Firewall’s key features include:

The ability to employ adaptive profiling. Administrators will have an easier time enforcing security policies once this feature is enabled. It takes data from safe sources and builds profiles that can be used to create whitelisting protocols that prevent unsafe actions from occurring on the system.
The ability to assess threats in real time. Barracuda Web Application Firewall uses machine learning to detect new threats and attacks as they emerge.
The ability to manage the Barracuda Web Application Firewall system from a single interface. Administrators can manage their Barracuda Web Application Firewall configurations from one centralized location.

Reviews from Real Users

Barracuda Web Application Firewall stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. One of the main ones is the robustness of the solution. Users are given access to a vast variety of security features in a single product.

PeerSpot user Muhammed S., a Presales Solutions Architect at Hilal Computers, notes this when he writes, "The solution offers multiple security features. There are machine learning features and great URL encryption. It also offers multi-protocol support against DDoS attacks."

Other reviewers note that Barracuda Web Application Firewall is user-friendly, easy to set up, stable, and reliable.

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.

Sample Customers

Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar

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