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HAProxy vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall comparison

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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

Cloudflare Web Application ...
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Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HAProxy
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (2nd), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (7th), Service Mesh (2nd)
Ivanti Virtual Web Applicat...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
43rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
0
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (16th)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
CTO at PlayNirvana
Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.
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.
MD
Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Good feature set and is simple to deploy
In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered. We've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else. We sort of stopped deploying them because of that. There are additional costs to the standard licensing. There are bandwidth prices. The feature set is quite good. We've been told to stop using them because of the price. If they can do something to address that I believe it would be better. On the latest version they've got a community edition, which is quite a good bandwidth, but in essence, it's to address the entry-level price. When you get to 10 gig bandwidth, it's way too expensive.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For us, the key feature of Cloudflare is DDoS protection and IP hiding, especially since we are a crypto company."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."
"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"Stability is number one."
"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."
"It’s a reliable product with good technical support."
"Compared to the others in the market, such as Citrix and F5, the cost per performance for Aloha appliances is extremely low, and in our experience, the performance and reliability is better."
"It is scalable."
"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."
"It is fast, flexible, and rock solid."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is simple to deploy. The deployment took us ten minutes."
 

Cons

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."
"The product does not have any new technologies."
"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."
"Also, having multiple HAProxy nodes in High Availability mode requires the use of clustering software such as Pacemaker and Corosync which are very complex."
"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."
"A better GUI would be nice."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered. We've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"It is not too pricey."
"HAProxy is free open-source software."
"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."
"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."
"The product is open source."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...
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...
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?
HAProxy already provides many of the features that other solutions in the market are providing, such as Nginx, so I d...
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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
Pulse vWAF, Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Gilt Groupe
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, HAProxy, NetScaler and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC). Updated: May 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.