No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

HAProxy vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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)
12th
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 (7th), Service Mesh (4th)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
34th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 2.0%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is 1.2%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HAProxy2.0%
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)1.2%
Other96.8%
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.
reviewer2161107 - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Room for improvement with user interface while competitive pricing impresses
It is managed through Infrastructure as Code, so all configurations can be managed in the code itself, which is beneficial. Because it uses rules, it is easy to set up, and we have many different sites where the configurations are straightforward. Though the UI is not very interactive, which is a downside, we can manage many things. The UI is not very intuitive and could be better. However, we manage all the configurations through code, which is easy to maintain. It has extensive anomaly detection capabilities, so the traffic is classified into several categories where thresholds can be defined and customized based on false positives and false negatives. This is advantageous because you do not need to tweak it very often. Once you set it up, an audit once a quarter would suffice. Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"​​Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"Scalable and inexpensive."
"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."
"I have deployed over 50 instances of HAProxy over the past 15 years and never encountered any stability issues."
"The features I find valuable in this solution are session control which automatically disconnects users that forget to log off, and the ability to write rules to either allow or block certain file requests."
"HAProxy is definitely a dependable choice; the only thing that needs some attention is the initial learning curve, and when you get past that, it is a great tool to use and we are very happy with it."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
"Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate."
 

Cons

"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"From my point of view, the configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface."
"Full layer 7 SSL termination is limited to a single core, which is a problem."
"I'm unsure about the benchmark of those HTTP 2.0 requests on HAProxy."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."
"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."
"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."
"The UI is not very intuitive and could be better."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."
"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."
"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."
"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
"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."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"The product is open source."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?
The pricing is very competitive compared to other providers. The pricing is definitely a factor in our decision-making process.
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
We do use it, but the UI can be improved as we mostly work through the CI/CD. It provides support, but sometimes it is hard to navigate unless you are very familiar with it.
What is your primary use case for Signal Sciences?
The CDN is for caching and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is for protecting the servers from malicious traffic. They both perform different jobs and serve different purposes, ...
 

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about HAProxy vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.