F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs HAProxy comparison

F5 and HAProxy are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.0, while HAProxy is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.9. F5 holds a 1.9% mindshare in WAF, compared to HAProxy’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of HAProxy users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 Distributed Cloud Services 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 F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. HAProxy

June 2026

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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

Cloudflare Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.0%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 2.0%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	4.0%
HAProxy	2.0%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.9%
Other	92.1%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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Mohan Janarthanan

Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions

Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

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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.

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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

"The impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."

"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."

"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."

"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."

"It protects web applications efficiently."

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."

"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."

"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."

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

"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."

"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."

"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."

"It is fast, flexible, and rock solid."

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

"The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something."

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."

"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 notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"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 product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."

"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."

"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)."

"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."

"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading."

"I would like to see a two (or more) native cluster support without third parties or DNS manipulations."

"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."

"While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties."

"In my previous job we had some stability issues related to configuration and compatibility with other products."

"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"It is not too pricey."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"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."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

"The product is open source."

"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

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

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

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

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

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	18
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	16

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.

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What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I need to think about this for the future. F5 Distributed Cloud Services needs to create links with Amazon and Google...

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What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I collect reviews for F5 Distributed Cloud Services and F5 Silverline Managed Services. I work with F5 Distributed Cl...

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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 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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with HAProxy?

HAProxy already provides many of the features that other solutions in the market are providing, such as Nginx, so I d...

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Comparisons

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Compared 7% of the time

Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

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Azure Front Door vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 13% of the time

Akamai vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 9% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 8% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 6% of the time

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NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

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

Compared 10% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 6% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

June 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services

June 2026

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

June 2026

Download HAProxy product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall integrates DDoS protection, load balancing, and firewall capabilities. Its ease of use, configurability, and robust security measures make it a versatile choice for protecting web applications.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive defense against threats with advanced reporting and robust security measures. It includes DNS integration, rate limiting, and extensive rule sets, all within a SaaS model that allows API configurability. Users value its caching, scalability, and pricing, although enhancements are needed in rate-limiting and third-party integration. Improvements in customer support, especially in India, real-time controls, and user documentation are also desired. Users seek a more intuitive dashboard, better log management, and improved alert systems, along with multitenancy capabilities and enhanced reporting.

What are the key features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

DDoS Protection: Shields applications from denial-of-service attacks
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution
DNS Integration: Enhances domain name system security
Rate Limiting: Controls traffic flow and reduces abuse
Extensive Rule Sets: Offers customizable security rules

What benefits and ROI can users find in reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing business needs
Pricing: Offers reasonable pricing structure
Caching: Improves application performance and speed
Configurable Security: Provides customizable defense settings
Efficient Management: Simplifies security and application control

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall finds application in industries like banking and retail by acting as a comprehensive security gateway, managing authentication and authorization while protecting web applications from malicious Layer 7 traffic. It also implements load balancing, CDN, and zero-trust policies, supported by advanced reporting, analytics tools, and threat scoring to meet specific industry needs.

Cloudflare

F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.

HAProxy delivers reliability, high performance, and efficient load balancing solutions. Its open-source model ensures cost-effectiveness and scalability, ideal for managing extensive infrastructure demands with minimal latency while offering seamless integration with modern platforms.

HAProxy is renowned for its robust performance in load balancing across TCP and HTTP protocols, featuring multiple algorithms such as round-robin. Users appreciate its customizable configuration and seamless SSL termination, which make it an excellent choice for managing complex infrastructures. The platform's open-source nature supports scalability, reducing costs while providing flexible proxy operations. HAProxy efficiently handles high concurrency, enabling smooth traffic management and ensuring stability within diverse systems.

What key features does HAProxy offer?

Load Balancing: Balances TCP and HTTP traffic using algorithms like round-robin
SSL Termination: Provides secure, seamless SSL termination for user connections
Customizable Configuration: Offers detailed configuration options for tailored setups
Traffic Management: Comprehensive management of large traffic loads
Open-Source: Cost-effective, scalable solution for tech infrastructures

What benefits and ROI aspects should you consider?

Reliability: High performance with minimal latency, enhancing user satisfaction
Scalability: Open-source model ensures growth without considerable cost
Integration: Compatible with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud services
Stability: Robust architecture supports complex infrastructures smoothly

HAProxy is extensively used in load balancing implementations across various sectors. Companies deploy it for managing high traffic, Layer 4 and Layer 7 applications, and SQL databases. It supports microservices architecture, performs SSL offloading, and manages email services like SMTP. As a reverse proxy, HAProxy delivers high availability for systems like Redis, RabbitMQ, and Apache while integrating with Docker and Kubernetes. Its features enhance web application firewall capabilities and traffic routing, making it suitable for industries demanding reliable and efficient network management.

HAProxy

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Information Not Available

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

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. HAProxy

June 2026

Free Report: F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. HAProxy

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.

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