HAProxy Enterprise WAF vs Kong Gateway WAF

HAProxy Enterprise WAF

Model: Custom pricing (contact sales)

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Kong Gateway WAF

Model: Tiered (Plus per-gateway + Enterprise custom)

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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.

Kong Gateway WAF

• Gateway-Embedded WAF

  WAF runs as a plugin inside the Kong Gateway process, inspecting API traffic at the same layer where routing, authentication, and rate limiting occur. No separate WAF appliance or additional proxy hop needed.

• OWASP Top 10 Protection

  Built-in protection against common web application attacks including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, command injection, and path traversal at the API gateway layer.

• Plugin Ecosystem

  Over 100 plugins for security, traffic control, authentication, and observability. WAF works alongside bot detection, IP restriction, CORS, ACL, and rate limiting plugins in a configurable execution chain.

• Third-Party WAF Integrations

  Open plugin architecture supports third-party WAF engines including open-appsec (ML-driven detection) and Wallarm (API security). Teams can choose the WAF engine that fits their threat model.

• Kubernetes-Native Deployment

  Kong Ingress Controller and Kong Kubernetes Operator provide native Kubernetes integration. WAF policies can be managed declaratively through Kubernetes CRDs alongside gateway configuration.

• Hybrid Mode

  Cloud-managed control plane with self-hosted data planes. WAF policies are centrally managed and distributed to data planes running in any environment, including air-gapped networks.

• AI Gateway

  Dedicated AI gateway capabilities including LLM proxy, token-based rate limiting, semantic caching, PII sanitization, prompt guardrails, and MCP server proxy. WAF protects AI endpoints alongside traditional APIs.

• Declarative Configuration

  Gateway and WAF configuration can be managed as code through declarative YAML/JSON, enabling GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipeline integration for security policy changes.

• Advanced Rate Limiting

  Enterprise-grade rate limiting with sliding window counters, consumer groups, and cluster-wide synchronization. Works in conjunction with WAF to prevent both application-layer attacks and abuse.