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HAProxy vs Radware Cloud WAF Service comparison

 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
HAProxy boosts efficiency by reducing costs and staff needs, offering speed, reliability, and enhanced scalability for traffic management.
Sentiment score
6.2
Radware Cloud WAF Service enhances security, reduces costs, and boosts operational efficiency, reliability, and application protection.
Operational efficiency has improved; we no longer have staff consistently monitoring backend servers during deployment or scaling events, as HAProxy's health checks and hitless reloads allow us to push changes with minimal manual intervention.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
This resulted in a drastic decrease in costs and, at the same time, the accuracy of the hits coming on HAProxy was almost around 100% or 99.99%.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
I estimate seeing a return on investment with HAProxy, as it significantly reduced staff requirements and enhanced scaling capabilities, particularly when transitioning from NGINX, which faced issues.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
I wouldn't be able to give a number, but Radware Cloud WAF does save time for our staff due to the automation and excellent detection, which is invaluable.
Lead Network Reliability Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
With our on-prem solution, we spent a lot of time on maintenance tasks, OS updates, and ensuring appliances ran smoothly, but with Cloud WAF, all that is managed by the cloud team, allowing us to focus on alert analysis.
Application Supervisor at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
We get major insights from the analytics rules and dashboards, allowing us to pinpoint main issues.
IT Security Engineer at Adani Enterprises Ltd
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.3
HAProxy's support is praised for responsiveness and skill, though some suggest improved documentation and communication for better efficiency.
Sentiment score
7.5
Radware Cloud WAF Service is praised for responsive, knowledgeable support, though communication and API functionality could improve.
Since we are utilizing the open-source edition, community forums, mailing lists, and GitHub have been invaluable, with typically someone having encountered the same problems we faced.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the technical support that Radware provides for Cloud WAF Service a perfect ten.
IT Security Engineer at Adani Enterprises Ltd
I would give the Radware technical support a ten out of ten. They are definitely outstanding.
Security Operations Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer support a ten.
Analista de cybersecurity at Globalhitss
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
HAProxy is highly scalable, adaptable for small to medium businesses, efficiently handling substantial connections and diverse user volumes.
Sentiment score
8.1
Radware Cloud WAF Service offers high scalability and seamless integration, handling growth and user demands efficiently without latency issues.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
The scalability of Radware Cloud WAF Service rates as a perfect ten out of ten, as we haven't encountered any scaling issues.
Application Supervisor at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
The scalability of the Radware Cloud WAF Service deserves a full ten, as it is definitely scalable.
IT Engineer at Adani Enterprises Ltd
In terms of scalability, it's also a 10 out of 10 because we are using Radware Cloud WAF Service for more than 60,000 employees in our organization, and it works perfectly fine.
SOC Analyst at Adani Enterprises Ltd
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
HAProxy offers high stability and reliable performance, enhancing system uptime with minimal downtime and frequent functionality updates.
Sentiment score
8.1
Radware Cloud WAF Service is highly reliable and stable, with minimal downtime and prompt maintenance notifications for enterprise needs.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
CEo at CloudPositive
We have reduced a lot of servers, replacing them with one or two HAProxy servers which deliver better performance, accuracy, and an almost 100% success rate with requests.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
The stability of Radware Cloud WAF Service is excellent, and I would rate it as a ten.
Security Team Leader at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The stability of Radware Cloud WAF Service is perfect; I would rate it a ten out of ten.
IT Manager at Adani Enterprises Ltd
Regarding stability, I can say that in the last one and a half years, I haven't seen any downtime.
SOC Analyst at Adani Enterprises Ltd
 

Room For Improvement

Users recommend improved HAProxy documentation, management tools, dynamic configuration, cloud integration, APIs, and enhanced load-balancing and clustering capabilities.
Radware Cloud WAF needs better reporting, support, integration, and AI, with improved documentation, accessibility, and training resources.
The configuration syntax is powerful yet can become overwhelming for newcomers; a more beginner-friendly interface or a native GUI without relying on third-party tools would ease the onboarding process.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
It would be beneficial if we could perform POST requests and integrate our applications more effectively.
System Admin at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The documentation is not up to par, as while the platform's system is robust, the documentation, particularly for API integration, could be more developer-friendly with real-world use cases.
CIO at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
To improve Radware Cloud WAF Service, I believe it should enable full application and API coverage to ensure all web applications and APIs, including internal and legacy web services, are onboarded.
Assistant Manager (Network and Cyber Security) at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers find HAProxy cost-effective, with free open-source options and a pricier Enterprise Edition offering enhanced features.
Radware Cloud WAF's pricing is competitive, especially bundled, with costs based on bandwidth and optional features.
Since we use the open-source edition, there are no licensing fees, with the main cost being the infrastructure running on EC2 instances in AWS, which helps maintain low expenses.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
Pricing could be more competitive, especially for smaller customers.
EVP, Chief Digital officer and head of Cybersecurity at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
I find Radware Cloud WAF to be a quite expensive product compared to others.
engineer with 51-200 employees
The pricing is not cheap; it is expensive, but it is effective.
Cyber security manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

HAProxy offers high performance load balancing with customization, scalability, and support for diverse environments, enhancing user experience and flexibility.
Radware Cloud WAF Service efficiently secures applications, offering bot management, DDoS protection, and seamless CDN integration with low false positives.
By moving all SSL termination to the load balancer, I now manage certificates in a single place, and I can also utilize Let's Encrypt with HAProxy's built-in ACME support, making renewal automatic.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
As a production engineer at that time, I definitely wanted to ensure that the system could handle massive connections, especially since we operated an e-commerce platform where we could not lose any customer calls.
CEo at CloudPositive
The most important aspect of Radware Cloud WAF is that it is over the cloud, offering a comprehensive solution that includes WAF, API protection, bots, and Layer 7 DDoS.
EVP, Chief Digital officer and head of Cybersecurity at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
It has features such as API security that protect against advanced attacks, including business logic attacks.
Application Supervisor at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
The automated analytics for looking at events in Radware Cloud WAF Service are working for us; the automatic event correlation is very beneficial to analyze how the alerts and events occur and visualize the patterns of network traffic and other traffic going in and out from the application via Radware Cloud WAF Service.
IT Engineer at Adani Enterprises Ltd
 

Categories and Ranking

HAProxy
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (2nd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (6th), Service Mesh (3rd)
Radware Cloud WAF Service
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 1.9%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Radware Cloud WAF Service is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Radware Cloud WAF Service1.6%
HAProxy1.9%
Other96.5%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Shrinivas Devarkonda - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
AT
SOC Analyst at Adani Enterprises Ltd
Has significantly improved threat visibility and reduced false positives through intelligent bot detection and real-time analysis
The best features of Radware Cloud WAF Service that I prefer most include the bot protection. Its deployment was very smooth and flexible when I started deploying it. The reporting and visibility feature of the Bot Manager are noteworthy, as the dashboard gives clear insight into the traffic, activity, and block threats. The AI threat intelligence feature is quite impressive. In terms of blocking unknown threats and attacks, I assess Radware Cloud WAF Service as quite impressive; if I have to rate it out of 10, I would rate it eight and a half. The automated analytics for looking at events with Radware Cloud WAF Service is generally fine, and whenever we use it, it gives almost perfect results. In API protection with Radware Cloud WAF Service, we have multiple applications that we are using currently, and whenever there is any threat related to an API, it helps us provide detailed insight. Additionally, whenever there is unusual API traffic, it helps us monitor and detect threats.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise46
 

Questions from the Community

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-source product. HAProxy is also a good choice for someone looking for a stable ...
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.
What needs improvement with HAProxy?
For the limited use that I have of HAProxy, I don't have any points to improve. I think I need more time with this tool, or perhaps I simply don't have areas that need to get better. I don't have a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Cloud WAF Service?
The cost of Radware Cloud WAF Service is actually a bit high, but given all these benefits, the investment makes sense.
What needs improvement with Radware Cloud WAF Service?
There is no room for improvement that I can see at this time because it is very straightforward. I do not think it needs improvement as it already has an AI component. Radware Cloud WAF Service has...
What is your primary use case for Radware Cloud WAF Service?
The use case involves protecting applications by redirecting them to Radware Cloud WAF Service. The implementation depends on the number of applications you want to protect.
 

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about HAProxy vs. Radware Cloud WAF Service and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.