Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs HAProxy comparison

Fortinet and HAProxy are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Fortinet is ranked #23 with an average rating of 9.0, while HAProxy is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.2. Additionally, 100% of Fortinet 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 Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service 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 Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy

December 2025

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Helped 879,853 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

Featured Reviews

Herb Angle

Owner at Hga consulting

Has helped manage client domains with streamlined access control and threat visibility

I don't know what areas could be improved with Cloudflare WAF; Cloudflare is constantly improving and adding features to their feature set. They're doing a good job, and as far as DNS and support for any domains that I create or my clients create, it's mandatory for me to make sure that they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider. The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service. It doesn't pay to try to host your own website.

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RahulArora

Global Head - DevOps and AIOps Startegist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Cloud security has reduced web attack incidents and protects our public applications and APIs

The best features Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service offers include managed WAF rules, OWASP protection, bot mitigation, and Fortinet threat intelligence. In day-to-day work, I use all of the features: managed WAF rules, OWASP protection, bot mitigation, and Fortinet threat intelligence. This provides a strong baseline security without requiring deep WAF expertise internally. The integration with the broader Fortinet security system is a plus regarding the features. In terms of its impact on our organization, Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service has been positively protecting us from security threats and automated attacks. With this layered protection against common web and API attacks, we have noticed that the incidents and risks have been reduced to a greater extent.

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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

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

More Cloudflare pros

"With this layered protection against common web and API attacks, we have noticed that the incidents and risks have been reduced to a greater extent."

"Fortinet FortiWeb offers a variety of protections, including machine learning that helps protect web applications."

"It is a secure tool."

"Regular updates are one of the aspects I appreciate about Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service, and it is provided by a leading brand in cybersecurity."

"The company provides technical support, and they are mostly available 24/7."

"It is user-friendly and easy to work with."

"I rate the overall solution ten out of ten."

"The technical support is really good."

More Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service pros

"We definitely saw fewer employees needed and money saved; we achieved 100% money savings and fewer employees with very little maintenance required."

"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."

"The solution is user-friendly and efficient."

"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."

"Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development."

"Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind."

"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."

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

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"Latencies are always a problem."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"Eventually, things go sideways and require fixes when it would have been easier to prevent the issue initially."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"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."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"The usability of the interface could be improved as it is not user-friendly."

"The only thing I encountered was related to integration, mostly concerning translation."

"I do not have any notes on improvement."

"The utilization of AI in Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service still needs to be upgraded and improved."

"Better visibility and more intuitive reporting would be helpful for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service."

"Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service could be improved with better logging capabilities, as many come with less spacing, necessitating a FortiSIM for enhanced functionality."

"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."

"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"

"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 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."

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

"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)."

"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 product does not have any new technologies."

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"We are using the free version."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."

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

"The product is open source."

"It is free of cost."

"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 tool is open-source."

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

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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879,853 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Energy/Utilities Company

12%

Hospitality Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

17%

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	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	25

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

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

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service is good, and i...

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What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?

Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service could be improved with better logging capabilities, as many come with less s...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service?

Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service protects our customers' websites, including e-commerce sites, normal website...

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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 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

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 44% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 12% of the time

NetScaler vs Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 10% of the time

Atomic ModSecurity Rules vs Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 10% of the time

More Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service Competitors

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

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

Compared 11% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

January 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

January 2026

Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service report

Download Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service product report

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

December 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service provides cloud-based web application protection, ensuring businesses secure their web apps against threats without hardware management, offering dynamic scalability and threat intelligence.

Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service offers an advanced security platform that effectively protects web applications from cyber threats by leveraging comprehensive threat intelligence and efficient traffic management. Its cloud-native architecture facilitates seamless integration, allowing for scalable security solutions that adapt to varying demand levels. Known for reducing complexity, it empowers organizations to focus on strategic initiatives without the need for dedicated on-premise resources. The service also provides robust analytics, enabling informed decision-making based on real-time threat landscapes.

What are the key features?

Auto-scaling: Automatically adjusts resources to handle increasing traffic without manual intervention.
Threat Intelligence: Uses comprehensive data to preempt and mitigate potential threats effectively.
Centralized Management: Simplifies monitoring and control of web application security through a single interface.
Robust Analytics: Offers detailed insights into traffic and threat patterns for better decision-making.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces the financial burden of maintaining hardware with a cloud-based approach.
Scalability: Easily adapts to business growth without requiring additional infrastructure investments.
Enhanced Security: Provides up-to-date threat protection, safeguarding critical business data.
Resource Optimization: Frees technical staff to focus on core business objectives by managing security centrally.

In industries such as finance and e-commerce where sensitive data protection is paramount, Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service is extensively implemented to secure web applications against potential vulnerabilities. It ensures compliance with stringent regulatory standards and protects consumer information, thus maintaining trust and brand reputation. Healthcare providers leverage it to protect patient records, a sector that demands the utmost security and confidentiality.

Fortinet

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

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy

December 2025

Free Report: Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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