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Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service 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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF...
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (24th)
HAProxy
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th), Bot Management (9th), Service Mesh (2nd)
 

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.
Lilian Blaitt - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficiently identifies and addresses vulnerabilities while providing robust protection
It is a secure tool. It is user-friendly and easy to work with. It is possible to easily find vulnerabilities with the WAF. I understand that the return is good since I haven't had any significant attacks. The vulnerabilities I found were easy to close. I think the return is good. It is a good tool.
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

"The tool is user-friendly."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"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."
"It is a secure tool."
"The company provides technical support, and they are mostly available 24/7."
"The technical support is really good."
"Fortinet FortiWeb offers a variety of protections, including machine learning that helps protect web applications."
"I rate the overall solution ten out of ten."
"The stability of the solution is excellent."
"It is user-friendly and easy to work with."
"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."
"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."
"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"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."
"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."
"It is scalable."
"The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."
"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."
 

Cons

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"The only thing I encountered was related to integration, mostly concerning translation."
"The usability of the interface could be improved as it is not user-friendly."
"The usability of the interface could be improved as it is not user-friendly."
"I do not have any notes on improvement."
"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"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."
"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."
"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."
"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The price is reasonable."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"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."
Information not available
"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 a free 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."
"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"HAProxy is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
No data available
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
10%
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
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
The price is not the cheapest, but it offers great value for money. I would rate it as an eight out of ten for pricing.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
While we find the solution to be really good overall, some improvements could be made to the alerting system, specifi...
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?
We use Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service situated in front of our web-facing APIs. This includes everything th...
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?
Our experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been quite straightforward. Since we use the open-source ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
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.
Information Not Available
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Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
873,085 professionals have used our research since 2012.