Cloudflare One vs HAProxy comparison

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Cloudflare One

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloudflare One and HAProxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudflare One vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: January 2026).

Cloudflare One vs. HAProxy

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Helped 881,082 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 One

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

7th

Ranking in Bot Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Email Security (21st), Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (16th), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (21st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (11th), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (13th), Access Management (10th), ZTNA as a Service (8th), ZTNA (2nd), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (10th), Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) (3rd)

HAProxy

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

6th

Ranking in Bot Management

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th), Service Mesh (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare One is 4.1%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 1.5%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
HAProxy	1.5%
Cloudflare One	4.1%
Other	94.4%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Cobe Van Coller

Network Architect at IP Dimension

Cloud security has improved remote access and has reduced costs for smaller client sites

I have used Cloudflare One's Identity-Aware Proxy, and it is quite straightforward from what I have seen so far. The app registration on the Azure side integrates fully into Cloudflare, and I am very satisfied with that part because it is easy to set up. The integration of Cloudflare One's Secure Web Gateway and Zero Trust Network Access works without any issues. That part is pretty automatic, and if you complete the rest of the setup, it comes together by itself with no issues from my side. What makes it nice is that we can actually start replacing on-site firewalls at this stage for the smaller clients because it does not matter if they go to a coffee shop or work from home; they are still secured by the same connection. The hops get shorter and you get better latency. We have done testing to see if it is better. One thing that we did notice with our proof of concept with our current client is that they have people connecting from the UK. When they used their previous VPN solution, uploading CAD drawings and other files to the server took a long time. They mentioned that it is much quicker on Cloudflare One's solution. I definitely believe that is part of the improved performance, and I am satisfied with that as well. What is nice about Cloudflare One is that it makes the setup easier and also easier to train technicians to maintain it. Compared to legacy systems, we do not need to get fancy firewalls in place that are costly. That is definitely also a cost-saver with Cloudflare One.

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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

"For Cloudflare Access, I am using the free plan...The most valuable feature is their protection."

"The solution has different options that can be used to differentiate DDoS attacks."

"The capabilities of the software are strong enough for me to do what it's supposed to do. For me, we don't need to do a lot of configuration on our site. We just enable it and monitor it."

"The tool also offers good scalability, and the dashboard, along with real-time analytics, is very good."

"The best feature is rate limiting. If I'm expecting 500 visits per hour, Cloudflare will limit the requests if I suddenly get 50,000."

"Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform removes the risk of exposing the applications to the public."

"Cloudflare, in my opinion, was easy to implement."

"It's the endpoint exposition. We don't need to expose our VPN server to the internet and need a zero-test solution. I can apply some conditional access to the endpoint that's connecting to our network to check their security policies or the security condition of their workstation. Once the workstation is trying to connect to my internal network, then I would like to check the discrete condition of these endpoints that are trying to access my internal network. We created some conditional access. We have CrowdStrike, to check if the CrowdStrike is installed, to check if it's updated, and to check for Windows updates. We created some conditional policies to check it."

More Cloudflare One pros

"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."

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

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

"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."

"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."

"We achieved 100% money savings and fewer employees with very little maintenance required."

"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."

"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

"The free plan has limitations. For example, I can only set up three rules, and the application firewall is unavailable."

"There are premium tier live service and lower tier live service, so we opted for the lower tier. But there is no medium tier where we pay a little extra and get a bit more service. So if that can be improved."

"From a logging perspective, it is still a bit difficult to see exactly what users are being blocked with the current views."

"For the topic of improvement, providing some training material is one of my suggestions."

"They don't have a person to provide support for customers using the solution under their free plan."

"The software has automated alerts, but the automated alerts are not available in the mobile app."

"The onboarding process can be improved a little bit."

"The response time for support must be reduced."

More Cloudflare One cons

"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."

"I'm unsure about the benchmark of those HTTP 2.0 requests on HAProxy."

"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."

"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."

"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."

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

"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."

"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."

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of the solution is cheap. The licensing cost is also very low. I rate the cost and pricing a three out of ten."

"The price tag is no longer $200,000, but rather $300,000 to $400,000. It's twice."

"Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform's pricing is good."

"My company has to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution. There are no hidden charges apart from the licensing costs of the solution."

"The solution is not that expensive."

"The pricing is somewhere in the middle. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten."

"The prices are slightly expensive."

"The solution's pricing lacks transparency."

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

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

"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."

"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."

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

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.

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881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

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	10
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	10

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

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Access?

Cloudflare Access has strong integration with Microsoft, among other platforms. However, when it comes to Kaspersky, we have clients who typically encounter challenges. The usual setup involves con...

What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Access?

Cloudflare Access provides secure access to internal applications for employees, external members of the organization, or third-party providers. It acts similarly to a VPN but uses a different kind...

What advice do you have for others considering Cloudflare Access?

Cloudflare Access is one of the best integrations available. While about two hundred vendors offer similar services, Cloudflare's approach as a SASE solution stands out. Clients prefer a single pla...

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.

Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs Cloudflare One

Comparisons

Compared 5% of the time

Twingate vs Cloudflare One

Compared 4% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Cloudflare One

Compared 4% of the time

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform vs Cloudflare One

Compared 4% of the time

FortiSASE vs Cloudflare One

Compared 3% of the time

More Cloudflare One Competitors

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

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

Compared 10% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare One

Download Cloudflare One product report

Download HAProxy product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, Cloudflare Bot Management, Cloudflare Gateway, Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform, Cloudflare DDoS, Cloudflare SASE & SSE Platform

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

Cloudflare One is a comprehensive platform for security, performance, and connectivity. It provides features like rate limiting, DDoS protection, and application access, tailored to enhance user experience while securing internet access and accelerating communications.

Designed to integrate security measures with ease of use and scalability, Cloudflare One offers a secure web gateway and zero trust network access. These features ensure seamless setup and operation, making connectivity reliable and protected. Users appreciate its integrated console, intuitive interface, and the ability to manage risk effectively. It offers straightforward deployment, improves latency, and boasts cost-effectiveness. While its onboarding process and documentation need enhancement, its value in content delivery and application shielding is notable. Despite challenges in integrating Cloudflare Access with existing VPNs and the need for better automation and support, it remains vital for DNS and infrastructure protection.

What features make Cloudflare One stand out?

Rate Limiting: Controls the traffic rate to prevent abuse.
DDoS Protection: Shields applications from distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Secure Web Gateway: Provides secure internet access with seamless operation.
Zero Trust Network Access: Ensures secure, application-based connectivity without relying on traditional VPNs.
Access for Connectivity: Facilitates access to internal applications securely.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Security: Robust measures for DNS and browsing protection.
Performance: Enhanced site accessibility and communication speed.
Cost-Effectiveness: Offers competitive pricing for its features.
Ease of Deployment: Straightforward and efficient setup process.

In industries like finance, retail, and technology, Cloudflare One is crucial for enabling secure remote access and protecting web applications against dynamic threats. It supports compliance access policies and enhances content delivery, playing a key role in safeguarding digital infrastructure.

Cloudflare

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

23andMe

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

Cloudflare One vs. HAProxy