F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs HAProxy comparison

F5 and HAProxy are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #20 with an average rating of 9.0, while HAProxy is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.2. F5 holds a 1.8% mindshare in WAF, compared to HAProxy’s 2.4% 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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. HAProxy

March 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 March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 2.4%, down from 3.1% 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	5.4%
HAProxy	2.4%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.8%
Other	90.4%

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 Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."

"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."

"It is configurable via API."

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

"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."

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

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

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

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

"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."

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

"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 is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"

"Scalable and inexpensive."

"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."

"There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good."

"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."

"HAProxy positively impacted our organization by exceeding scalability expectations, initially projected at 200k requests but ultimately handling over 15 million transactions per second without any issues."

"The implementation of the HAProxy load balancing solution will allow Carers ACT to begin to deliver these new services."

"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."

More HAProxy pros

Cons

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

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"Support can be challenging at times."

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

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

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

"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."

"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."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

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

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

"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 main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."

"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."

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

"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."

"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."

"The documentation is extremely detailed, but I think it could be restructured so it isn't so daunting for beginners."

"While the product is quite perfect, it could use more supervision and be more active. Also, more simplicity, more peripherals, and more scalability."

"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."

"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."

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

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"It is not too pricey."

"The solution is expensive."

"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 annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"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 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 a free open-source solution."

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

"The tool is open-source."

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

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

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

"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."

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

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

11%

Construction Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
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...

See all answers

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

I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

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

See all answers

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

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is being used for web application firewall along with API security, bot protection, and...

See all answers

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 do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

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

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Competitors

Azure Front Door vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 10% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 10% of the time

Akamai vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudflare vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 9% of the time

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 8% of the time

More F5 Distributed Cloud Services Competitors

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

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

Compared 10% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 7% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

CDN

March 2026

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

March 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's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

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 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.

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

March 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: March 2026.

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