AWS WAF vs HAProxy comparison

Read 48 HAProxy reviews

7,737 Views
3,250 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

AWS WAF

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between AWS WAF 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 AWS WAF vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: August 2026).

AWS WAF vs. HAProxy

Download the complete report

Helped 911,493 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:

ROI

Sentiment score

5.7

AWS WAF offers cost-effective security by reducing the need for extra staff and effectively blocking threats.

Sentiment score

7.2

HAProxy boosts efficiency by reducing costs and staff needs, offering speed, reliability, and enhanced scalability for traffic management.

With AWS WAF, it is easier for us to block unwanted malicious DDoS attacks and threats from coming into our web application.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

Dev Ops Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Customer Service

Sentiment score

6.6

AWS WAF support is prompt and knowledgeable, but experiences vary in resolution speed and service costs.

Sentiment score

6.3

HAProxy's support is praised for responsiveness and skill, though some suggest improved documentation and communication for better efficiency.

Resolving issues can take time because the support personnel may lack product expertise, leading to delays.

Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

They reach out when you send them a ticket, and within 24 hours or less, someone is able to get back to you to solve your problem.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

Dev Ops Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.5

AWS WAF is highly scalable, versatile for various infrastructures, but some users desire expanded features for broader adaptability.

Sentiment score

7.7

HAProxy is highly scalable, adaptable for small to medium businesses, efficiently handling substantial connections and diverse user volumes.

AWS WAF does scale in the sense that it is fully managed and has automatic scaling.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

Dev Ops Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.3

AWS WAF is stable, effectively blocking threats, with minor issues in custom rules, and continuous improvements enhance reliability.

Sentiment score

8.1

HAProxy offers high stability and reliable performance, enhancing system uptime with minimal downtime and frequent functionality updates.

Since it protects web applications from common attacks such as SQL injection and XSS, it is very stable.

Dev Ops Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of reliability, I would rate AWS WAF about six out of ten due to the need for improved signature sets.

Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We faced issues with AWS WAF when writing the custom rules.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

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.

Sanooj Mananot

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Head of DevOps at TripFactory

Room For Improvement

AWS WAF requires enhanced features, security, user interface, documentation, seamless integrations, and added automation for improved effectiveness.

Users recommend improved HAProxy documentation, management tools, dynamic configuration, cloud integration, APIs, and enhanced load-balancing and clustering capabilities.

Compared to firewalls, WAFs generally provide limited stateful analysis capabilities.

Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

The level of granularity is not great, and as you cross a certain threshold, the cost goes up by twenty or thirty percent every time.

Shashank N

Security Engineer Dev Sec Ops at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

reviewer2774310

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Setup Cost

AWS WAF pricing is seen as affordable but can be costly in high-demand scenarios like DDoS attacks.

Enterprise buyers find HAProxy cost-effective, with free open-source options and a pricier Enterprise Edition offering enhanced features.

Due to our status as an AWS shop, AWS WAF is cost-effective for us, and we benefit from discounts due to our extensive use of AWS services.

Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The licensing cost for AWS WAF is just pay-as-you-go; it is a service-based model.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

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.

reviewer2774310

DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Valuable Features

AWS WAF enhances security with configurable rules, seamless AWS integration, scalability, and ease of deployment for threat protection.

HAProxy offers high performance load balancing with customization, scalability, and support for diverse environments, enhancing user experience and flexibility.

The biggest benefit of AWS WAF for us is to filter malicious requests, so we can protect our environment and application from malicious actors.

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

It has also helped to improve the posture of our application, prevent all DDoS attacks, and unnecessary traffic and SQL injection that is reducing the performance of our application.

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS WAF report

Dev Ops Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The specific outcomes showing how AWS WAF has helped our organization include improving our security posture by reducing the attack surface and reducing malicious attacks.

reviewer2849304

Senior Cloud Security at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the HAProxy report

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.

Sanooj Mananot

CEo at CloudPositive

Categories and Ranking

AWS WAF

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HAProxy

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

15th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (2nd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (6th), Service Mesh (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of AWS WAF is 4.2%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 1.9%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
AWS WAF	4.2%
HAProxy	1.9%
Other	93.9%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Has successfully filtered malicious traffic and allowed country-specific access controls

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

For improvement in AWS WAF, we can have better monitoring. One of the things that should be improved in AWS WAF is the monitoring; we need to identify the requests and where they are coming from. If it's a bot, we should differentiate the requests, whether they are automated or not. The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information. We also need a feature where we can filter specific requests. If there are scripts in the requests, we should be able to filter those requests to see if there are any scripts running from them.

Read full review

Handles high traffic efficiently and simplifies complex routing with rule-based logic

Head of DevOps at TripFactory

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.

Read full review

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.

See recommendations

911,493 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	28

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	18
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	16

Questions from the Community

What are the limitations of AWS WAF vs alternative WAFs?

Hi Varun, I have had experienced with several WAF deployments and deep technical assessments of the following: 1. Imperva WAF 2. F5 WAF 3. Polarisec Cloud WAF Typical limitations on cloud WAF is t...

How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft Azure Application Gateway web application firewall software was the better fit ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS WAF?

AWS WAF is affordable; it depends on the number of rules you apply. The licensing cost for AWS WAF is just pay-as-you-go; it is a service-based model.

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...

Imperva Application Security Platform vs AWS WAF

Comparisons

Compared 6% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs AWS WAF

Compared 6% of the time

Check Point WAF (formerly CloudGuard WAF) vs AWS WAF

Compared 5% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs AWS WAF

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs AWS WAF

Compared 4% of the time

More AWS WAF Competitors

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

Compared 9% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 8% of the time

LoadBalancer Enterprise vs HAProxy

Compared 6% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

AWS WAF

Download AWS WAF product report

Download HAProxy product report

Also Known As

AWS Web Application Firewall

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

AWS WAF provides configurable rules, integration with AWS services, and scalable protection against web threats like SQL injections and DDoS attacks. Its automation and reliable performance are highly valued by users.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall offering significant security features like geo-restriction, custom rules, and IP filtering. Designed for seamless orchestration within AWS environments, it facilitates easy configuration and threat automation. Users benefit from its security policies, enhancing application performance by protecting against threats such as cross-site scripting. Despite its strengths, there is a call for enhanced user interfaces, better documentation, flexible pricing, and improved support. Expanding features like real-time analysis, bot protection, and AI integration can further elevate its utility.

What are the key features of AWS WAF?

Configurable Rules: Customize rules to suit specific security needs.
Seamless Integration: Works smoothly with AWS services for comprehensive protection.
Scalability: Handles growing security demands efficiently.
Threat Automation: Automates many threat blocking processes reducing manual intervention.
Geo-Restriction: Restricts traffic based on geographic locations enhancing security.
Custom Rules and IP Filtering: Tailors traffic filtering to organizational requirements.

What benefits and ROI can users expect from AWS WAF?

Robust Security: Protects applications against multiple web threats improving safety.
Easy Configuration: Simplifies the process of establishing security protocols.
Performance Reliability: Users experience consistent and dependable service.
Improved Application Performance: Ensures applications run securely and efficiently without unnecessary disruptions.

AWS WAF is extensively used in industries hosting applications on AWS, protecting sensitive data, and monitoring for unauthorized access. Custom and managed rules help cater to infrastructure needs, serving a vital role in maintaining application security across various sectors.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

HAProxy delivers reliability, high performance, and efficient load balancing solutions. Its open-source model ensures cost-effectiveness and scalability, ideal for managing extensive infrastructure demands with minimal latency while offering seamless integration with modern platforms.

HAProxy is renowned for its robust performance in load balancing across TCP and HTTP protocols, featuring multiple algorithms such as round-robin. Users appreciate its customizable configuration and seamless SSL termination, which make it an excellent choice for managing complex infrastructures. The platform's open-source nature supports scalability, reducing costs while providing flexible proxy operations. HAProxy efficiently handles high concurrency, enabling smooth traffic management and ensuring stability within diverse systems.

What key features does HAProxy offer?

Load Balancing: Balances TCP and HTTP traffic using algorithms like round-robin
SSL Termination: Provides secure, seamless SSL termination for user connections
Customizable Configuration: Offers detailed configuration options for tailored setups
Traffic Management: Comprehensive management of large traffic loads
Open-Source: Cost-effective, scalable solution for tech infrastructures

What benefits and ROI aspects should you consider?

Reliability: High performance with minimal latency, enhancing user satisfaction
Scalability: Open-source model ensures growth without considerable cost
Integration: Compatible with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud services
Stability: Robust architecture supports complex infrastructures smoothly

HAProxy is extensively used in load balancing implementations across various sectors. Companies deploy it for managing high traffic, Layer 4 and Layer 7 applications, and SQL databases. It supports microservices architecture, performs SSL offloading, and manages email services like SMTP. As a reverse proxy, HAProxy delivers high availability for systems like Redis, RabbitMQ, and Apache while integrating with Docker and Kubernetes. Its features enhance web application firewall capabilities and traffic routing, making it suitable for industries demanding reliable and efficient network management.

Sample Customers

eVitamins, 9Splay, Senao International

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

AWS WAF vs. HAProxy