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F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF vs. HAProxy Community Edition

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF

    Score9.4 out of 10
    N/AF5 Networks offers the Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) to provide bot defense, advanced application protection, anti-bot SDK, and other features.N/A

    HAProxy Community Edition

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/AHAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.

    $0

    Pricing
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFHAProxy Community Edition
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFHAProxy Community Edition
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFHAProxy Community Edition
    Considered Both Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Open Source
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    20 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    18 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    20 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    17 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFHAProxy Community Edition
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
    Score9.2 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
    Score9.2 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFHAProxy Community Edition
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.6
    (21 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    8.4
    (10 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.7
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFHAProxy Community Edition
    Likelihood to Recommend
    F5
    I believe that in industrial environments like ours where we have to have bare metal devices near the production environment combined with hybrid cloud, that is a good platform. That's a good use case. It optimizes traffic. It helps us stay more secure in our data centers. Now with regards to that are fully operating in the cloud, I'm not really sure if we would make the same decision considering the option that I said to have something that is self-provision to avoid too much management of virtual machines on the cloud. So that's an area of improvement.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    F5
    • So the product definitely is helping us for sudden attacks through DDOS, some injection ingestion into UI URLs, and definitely it's capturing those and I definitely see that as an advantage for us. They can stop the hackers from using our endpoints.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    • Low-Cost Load Balancer
    • Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
    • Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
    • SSL Termination
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    F5
    • The UI for events. E.g., clicking the "Accept" button does nothing.
    • Traffic learning suggestions are often very incorrect. We were originally suggested to use "Automatic" learning, and had to completely scrap the policy due to the suggestions.
    • "All in one" dashboard for viewing application URL/parameter overrides per policy.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    • A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    F5
    We just love work with f5
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    F5
    Most* of it is very intuitive and easy to use. The "Help" section is fairly fantastic. See some of my other comments about things like the "Traffic Learning" section being wildly wrong sometimes, and also the event logs with UI buttons that don't do anything. Overall though, it's an excellent product.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    F5
    Highly knowledgeable engineers who understand complex networking and application-delivery issues.


    Strong escalation paths — once a case reaches senior engineers, resolutions are fast and accurate.


    Comprehensive documentation and many self-service resources for troubleshooting.


    Clear communication with well-structured updates throughout the ticket lifecycle.


    Excellent for critical incidents, with reliable guidance during high-severity outages.


    Deep product expertise across BIG-IP, ASM/Advanced WAF, GTM/DNS, and modern F5 services.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    F5
    -Stable data path equals to less crashes -Almost all the features working as expected -Provides more granular controls in allowing false positives -Request evaluation is accurate -Irules feature is a plus
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    F5
    • One impact F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF has on our organization's overall business objectives is that F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF is security sensitive
    • Another impact F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF has on our organization's overall business objectives is the F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF blocking feature
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    • Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
    • Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots