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Fortinet FortiDDoS 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
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Fortinet FortiDDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HAProxy
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
24th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (19th), Bot Management (12th), Service Mesh (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, up from 17.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiDDoS is 2.5%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 1.2%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare18.8%
Fortinet FortiDDoS2.5%
HAProxy1.2%
Other77.5%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

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.
Yazan Omar - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-use tool with great GUI
The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.
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

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"This solution can protect Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 attacks of applications for us."
"The equipment works very well, and I have not encountered any issues with it. It is a good solution for my company."
"The protection resources and the support are valuable features of the solution."
"I find the interface easy to use."
"Among its key features: Detects and mitigates DDoS attacks at L3 to L7; negligible to zero false-positives; Generates and sends reports without the need for an expensive third-party solution."
"The equipment works very well, and I have not encountered any issues with it."
"The product's initial setup phase was really easy."
"The solution is very user-friendly and very easy to use."
"We use the solution for load balancing."
"​It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors."
"Scalable and inexpensive."
"The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."
"It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."
"The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice."
 

Cons

"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"The solution can be a little more user-friendly and it can be more affordable."
"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."
"There aren't really any aspects of the solution we are unhappy with. It's been a positive experience overall."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"The main improvement would be to change the firewall model, however, currently, everything is fixed and working well."
"I would like to see analytics, big data."
"All the thresholds that need to be configured should be included in the default so that user will not forget or misconfigure."
"The tool needs to focus more on the area of application traffic management, where it currently has some shortcomings."
"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"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 are three main areas to improve: 1) Make remote management more modern by adding API. 2) Propose a general HA ​solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this). 3) Thread option should be a bit more stable."
"The visibility could be improved."
"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."
"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 GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."
"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."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"We are using the free version."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"It's quite pricey."
"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
"The product is open source."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."
"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."
"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 free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."
"It is free of cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
11%
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 Business10
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
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.
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would...
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?
The product's initial setup phase was really easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?
Fortinet FortiDDoS offers lower costs compared to other solutions. The licensing costs are annually renewed.
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.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos
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.
Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiDDoS vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.