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.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
We get major insights from the analytics rules and dashboards, allowing us to pinpoint main issues.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
I have primarily worked not with the tool's customer support but with the product's sales engineers and technical sales engineers, who seem to know their stuff.
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.
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the technical support that Radware provides for Cloud WAF Service a perfect ten.
I would give the Radware technical support a ten out of ten. They are definitely outstanding.
The support provided by Radware's Emergency Response Team is excellent.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
The scalability of Radware Cloud WAF Service rates as a perfect ten out of ten, as we haven't encountered any scaling issues.
The scalability of the Radware Cloud WAF Service deserves a full ten, as it is definitely scalable.
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.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
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.
I have never encountered downtime, maintenance-related issues, or latency.
The stability of Radware Cloud WAF Service is excellent, and I would rate it as a ten.
The stability of Radware Cloud WAF Service is perfect; I would rate it a ten out of ten.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements.
There are some performance considerations when it comes to dynamic content that involves fetching data from databases or using APIs.
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.
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
It would be beneficial if we could perform POST requests and integrate our applications more effectively.
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.
Improving dashboard capabilities to provide this information clearly for management is crucial.
I find it to be cheap.
I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive.
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.
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
Pricing could be more competitive, especially for smaller customers.
I find Radware Cloud WAF to be a quite expensive product compared to others.
The pricing is not cheap; it is expensive, but it is effective.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It has features such as API security that protect against advanced attacks, including business logic attacks.
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.

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 46 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 25 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 9 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 10 |
| Large Enterprise | 37 |
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?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.
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
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.
Radware’s Cloud WAF provides enterprise-grade, continuously adaptive web application security protection. Based on Radware’s ICSA Labs certified, market-leading web application firewall, it provides full coverage of OWASP Top-10 threats and zero-day attacks, while implementing both negative and positive web application security models to automatically adapt protections to evolving threats and protected assets.
Radware’s Cloud WAF offers full web security protection including OWASP Top-10 coverage, advanced attack protection and 0-day attack protection by implementing both negative and positive web application security models. It provides organizations “frictionless” application protection by automatically detecting and protecting new web applications as they are added to the network through automatic policy generation technology.
We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.