

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.
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.
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%.
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.
I wouldn't be able to give a number, but Radware Cloud WAF does save time for our staff due to the automation and excellent detection, which is invaluable.
With our on-prem solution, we spent a lot of time on maintenance tasks, OS updates, and ensuring appliances ran smoothly, but with Cloud WAF, all that is managed by the cloud team, allowing us to focus on alert analysis.
We get major insights from the analytics rules and dashboards, allowing us to pinpoint main issues.
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.
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the technical support that Radware provides for Cloud WAF Service a perfect ten.
I would give the Radware technical support a ten out of ten. They are definitely outstanding.
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer support a ten.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
The scalability of Radware Cloud WAF Service rates as a perfect ten out of ten, as we haven't encountered any scaling issues.
The scalability of the Radware Cloud WAF Service deserves a full ten, as it is definitely scalable.
In terms of scalability, it's also a 10 out of 10 because we are using Radware Cloud WAF Service for more than 60,000 employees in our organization, and it works perfectly fine.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
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.
The stability of Radware Cloud WAF Service is excellent, and I would rate it as a ten.
The stability of Radware Cloud WAF Service is perfect; I would rate it a ten out of ten.
Regarding stability, I can say that in the last one and a half years, I haven't seen any downtime.
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.
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
It would be beneficial if we could perform POST requests and integrate our applications more effectively.
The documentation is not up to par, as while the platform's system is robust, the documentation, particularly for API integration, could be more developer-friendly with real-world use cases.
To improve Radware Cloud WAF Service, I believe it should enable full application and API coverage to ensure all web applications and APIs, including internal and legacy web services, are onboarded.
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.
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
Pricing could be more competitive, especially for smaller customers.
I find Radware Cloud WAF to be a quite expensive product compared to others.
The pricing is not cheap; it is expensive, but it is effective.
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.
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.
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.
The most important aspect of Radware Cloud WAF is that it is over the cloud, offering a comprehensive solution that includes WAF, API protection, bots, and Layer 7 DDoS.
It has features such as API security that protect against advanced attacks, including business logic attacks.
The automated analytics for looking at events in Radware Cloud WAF Service are working for us; the automatic event correlation is very beneficial to analyze how the alerts and events occur and visualize the patterns of network traffic and other traffic going in and out from the application via Radware Cloud WAF Service.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Radware Cloud WAF Service | 1.6% |
| HAProxy | 2.0% |
| Other | 96.4% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 18 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 23 |
| Large Enterprise | 50 |
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?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.
Radware Cloud Application Protection Services is a cloud-delivered service that protects web applications and APIs across all environments against any type of application layer attack. It includes an advanced WAF, bot and AI agent trust management, account takeover protection, API security, DDoS protection, LLM firewall, vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and client-side protection. It uses AI-driven behavioral analysis to distinguish legitimate from malicious traffic and automatically adapt security policies, protecting against known vectors such as the OWASP Top 10, API Top 10, Top 21 automated threats, LLM Top 10, and more, as well as business logic attacks and supply chain attacks on the client side. The service is delivered through a global network of points of presence and scrubbing centers, using a proprietary API-based architecture that also allows for deployment without DNS changes, traffic rerouting, or SSL key sharing. It supports on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid environments, helps organizations comply with standards such as PCI DSS 4, NIS2, GDPR, HIPAA, and DORA, and includes threat intelligence and 24x7 managed security support.
Radware Cloud Application Protection Services are offered through a subscription-based pricing model, with fees determined by selected service tiers and specific application coverage required by the client. The service is structured to provide different levels of protection and features, and cost is typically based on factors such as the number of applications, bandwidth usage, and specific security functionalities included in the chosen package.
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