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HAProxy vs Wallarm NG WAF 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:
 

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)
Wallarm NG WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
39th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
API Security (14th)
 

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 Wallarm NG WAF is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HAProxy1.9%
Wallarm NG WAF1.0%
Other97.1%
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.
it_user796242 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Helps us to monitor attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them
Set up Wallarm as a reverse proxy. Do not replace your web server. Use Wallarm first in monitoring mode, then learn from Wallarm which type of request is false positive and which type of request is not. This process takes a couple of weeks for very highly-loaded web applications (few millions of unique visitors in one month). Then you can turn Wallarm into blocking mode and everything will be fine. Do not forget to build a monitoring system, the wave, and API for it. Before we started using Wallarm, I already knew Ivan (CEO) and Stepan (COO) from a couple of years before. Ivan had his own security company and Stepan was working on a Russian security magazine called Xakep. They told us that they wanted to create a new WAF and already had a working version of it. They asked me to test it. We did tests, and it was really good. After few month after testing, we signed an agreement. Our choice was made not because we knew these guys for a long time, but because the product was really cool and we were glad to start using it as one of the first on the market!

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Stability is number one."
"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"Others should try it out for sure. It’s a great solution backed by a very smart set of technical folks."
"The licensing fee for the entire WAF solution is very affordable with Loadbalancer.org, and there are no separate charges for HAProxy and WAF."
"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."
"We never have any downtime with it."
"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."
"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."
"Helps us to monitor situation in regards to attacks to our sites and prevents a lot of them."
"Vulnerability scanner and WAF are valuable features."
"With active threat detection, we are no longer over-swamped with tons of useless events."
"The most powerful feature is the ability to first learn what type of query to make to your web application when it is attacked and what type of query creates a false positive to your app."
"They are the only solution that fits our success criteria and business objectives: WAF must have a low (<5%) false negative rate and be ready to protect from all well-known web attacks."
"Perimeter control and active vulnerability scanner are the most valuable features."
 

Cons

"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit."
"HAProxy needs to improve its ability to handle a lot of connections, to be more like NGINX."
"The visibility could be improved."
"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup."
"​It needs proper HTTP/2 support.​"
"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."
"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."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"There were several stability issues during the first pilot."
"It needs more customization in PDF reports."
"The biggest problem for us was the stability and speed using the first version of Wallarm. Now, it is fine."
"Technical support is 6 or 7 out of 10. Sometimes we have had trouble with communication and understanding."
"Wallarm uses a learning mechanism to detect attacks and to avoid false positives. If Wallarm blocks some illegitimate request, then you can go to the management console and mark this request as false positive, but sometimes this does not work properly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"HAProxy is free open-source software."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."
"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."
"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."
"​Pricing must be cheaper than the competition and the licensing must be good.​"
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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%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Government
11%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

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...
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Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
Wallarm NG-WAF
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Panasonic. Miro. Rappi. Wargaming. Gannett. Omio. Acronis. Workforce Software. Tipalti. SEMRush.
Find out what your peers are saying about HAProxy vs. Wallarm NG WAF and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.