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Cloudflare One vs HAProxy 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 One
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
9th
Ranking in Bot Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (20th), Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (11th), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (22nd), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (13th), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (14th), Access Management (11th), ZTNA as a Service (7th), ZTNA (3rd), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (10th), Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) (2nd)
HAProxy
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
6th
Ranking in Bot Management
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (2nd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (13th), Service Mesh (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare One is 3.7%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HAProxy1.6%
Cloudflare One3.7%
Other94.7%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

CV
Network Architect at IP Dimension
Cloud security has improved remote access and has reduced costs for smaller client sites
I have used Cloudflare One's Identity-Aware Proxy, and it is quite straightforward from what I have seen so far. The app registration on the Azure side integrates fully into Cloudflare, and I am very satisfied with that part because it is easy to set up. The integration of Cloudflare One's Secure Web Gateway and Zero Trust Network Access works without any issues. That part is pretty automatic, and if you complete the rest of the setup, it comes together by itself with no issues from my side. What makes it nice is that we can actually start replacing on-site firewalls at this stage for the smaller clients because it does not matter if they go to a coffee shop or work from home; they are still secured by the same connection. The hops get shorter and you get better latency. We have done testing to see if it is better. One thing that we did notice with our proof of concept with our current client is that they have people connecting from the UK. When they used their previous VPN solution, uploading CAD drawings and other files to the server took a long time. They mentioned that it is much quicker on Cloudflare One's solution. I definitely believe that is part of the improved performance, and I am satisfied with that as well. What is nice about Cloudflare One is that it makes the setup easier and also easier to train technicians to maintain it. Compared to legacy systems, we do not need to get fancy firewalls in place that are costly. That is definitely also a cost-saver with Cloudflare One.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare Access is part of the Zero Trust philosophy."
"Using Cloudflare One makes my work quite easy because for DDoS protection, all I need to do is understand the OSI model and click; it makes it easier than trying to write a command line or use a Linux command."
"Cloudflare, in my opinion, was easy to implement."
"For Cloudflare Access, I am using the free plan...The most valuable feature is their protection."
"It's a perfect solution from my perspective; it's easy to understand and easy to configure."
"Cloudflare DDoS is better than its competitors for its security, deployment, and scalability."
"Cloudflare DDoS mitigates DDoS attacks."
"Enables me to work from two locations."
"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."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"Once the container is set up, the time it takes to deploy is typically under a minute, which gives me a full-blown solution with all the plugins and images that I am planning on using."
"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"The stability is good and passed all tests."
"​​Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment."
 

Cons

"From a logging perspective, it is still a bit difficult to see exactly what users are being blocked with the current views."
"The response time for support must be reduced."
"For the topic of improvement, providing some training material is one of my suggestions."
"The onboarding process can be improved a little bit."
"The tool should provide on-premise versions. Currently, all versions are cloud-based."
"Cloudflare DDoS has poor technical support."
"Our customers no longer use Cloudflare because its service is subpar."
"Our subscription plan for the solution has a limitation of bot signatures."
"The solution can be improved by controlling TCP behavior better and mandating to clients what the expected outcome must be in order to avoid receiving contestant timeout logs."
"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 web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible)."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
"The configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"HAProxy needs to improve its ability to handle a lot of connections, to be more like NGINX."
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of the solution is cheap. The licensing cost is also very low. I rate the cost and pricing a three out of ten."
"Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform's pricing is good."
"The solution's pricing lacks transparency."
"The prices are slightly expensive."
"My company has to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution. There are no hidden charges apart from the licensing costs of the solution."
"The pricing is somewhere in the middle. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten."
"The solution is not that expensive."
"The price tag is no longer $200,000, but rather $300,000 to $400,000. It's twice."
"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."
"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."
"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."
"HAProxy is free open-source software."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform?
In my opinion, Cloudflare One can be improved mainly through compatibility, as the integration should be much simpler because it is currently too closed and too proprietary. Regarding additional fe...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform?
Cloudflare One's primary use case for my organization is to protect servers and to provide remote access with the VPN, strong authentication, and DDoS protection. The integration of Secure Web Gate...
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...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, Cloudflare Bot Management, Cloudflare Gateway, Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform, Cloudflare DDoS, Cloudflare SASE & SSE Platform
HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

23andMe
Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare One vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
917,403 professionals have used our research since 2012.