BBQ Firewall vs HAProxy Enterprise WAF

BBQ Firewall

Model: Freemium (Free tier + paid licenses with lifetime option)

HAProxy Enterprise WAF

Model: Custom pricing (contact sales)

BBQ Firewall

• 7G/8G Request Filtering

  Regex-based pattern matching against incoming URIs, query strings, user agents, and referrers. Based on over a decade of refinement by Jeff Starr.

• SQL Injection Protection

  Blocks common SQL injection patterns including UNION, SELECT, eval(), and base64-encoded payloads.

• Directory Traversal Protection

  Catches path traversal attempts, null byte injection, and requests for sensitive system files.

• Bad Bot Blocking

  Filters known malicious user agents and referrer spam patterns.

• Request Method Scanning

  Checks all HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) against firewall rules.

• Customizable Patterns

  Add, edit, or remove firewall patterns to fine-tune protection for your specific site (Pro feature).

• Block Statistics

  Visual bar graphs showing hit counts per pattern to measure firewall effectiveness (Pro feature).

• Email Alerts

  Receive notifications when requests are blocked (Pro feature).

HAProxy Enterprise WAF

• Intelligent WAF Engine

  Machine learning-powered threat detection trained on 60+ billion daily requests. Detects zero-day and polymorphic attacks without relying on static signatures. 98.5% balanced accuracy in open source benchmarks.

• OWASP CRS Compatibility

  Optional mode that runs OWASP Core Rule Set rules through the Intelligent WAF Engine, dramatically reducing latency and false positive rates compared to traditional CRS processing.

• WAF Profiles

  Customizable security profiles per application, allowing fine-tuned policies based on each app's unique traffic patterns. Minimizes false positives and alert fatigue for diverse application portfolios.

• Bot Management

  Proprietary bot detection module with 100% local processing for low latency. Identifies and manages automated traffic using fingerprinting and behavioral analysis.

• Global Rate Limiting

  Dynamic, cluster-wide rate limiting powered by the Global Profiling Engine. Tracks and enforces rate limits in real-time across distributed deployments.

• HAProxy Fusion Control Plane

  Centralized management, monitoring, and automation of WAF policies across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-team deployments from a single dashboard.

• DDoS Protection

  Full-spectrum DDoS mitigation via HAProxy Edge, protecting against volumetric, protocol, and application-layer attacks.

• In-Process Architecture

  WAF runs in the same process as HAProxy, adding virtually zero latency and CPU overhead. No separate WAF appliance or proxy hop required.

• Threat Intelligence

  Real-time threat intelligence from HAProxy Edge's global network, continuously updating the ML models that power the WAF engine.