Free WAF Comparison
WAF which is also known as the Web Application Firewall. Unlike traditional firewalls, WAF operates at the application layer and provides better protection for Web systems based on the HTTP/HTTPS protocol, safeguarding them from hacker attacks.
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a security system that sits in front of a web application to inspect, filter, and block malicious traffic. It acts as an intermediary between the internet and your website or web application, examining HTTP requests and responses for potential threats.
Conclusion
| Self-Hosted | Web UI | Anti-Exploit | Deploy | Anti-Bot | Rate Limiting | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | NO | YES | NO | Reverse Proxy | YES | YES |
| SafeLine WAF | YES | YES | YES | Reverse Proxy | YES | YES |
| ModSecurity | YES | NO | YES | SDK | NO | NO |
| NAXSI | YES | NO | YES | Nginx Module | NO | NO |
| OpenAppSec | NO | YES | YES | SDK | NO | YES |
| BunkerWeb | YES | YES | NO | Nginx Module | NO | NO |
| Haltdos WAF | YES | YES | YES | Nginx Module | NO | YES |
Cloudflare
The Cloudflare WAF runs on the Cloudflare global network and sits in front of web applications to stop a wide range of real-time attacks using powerful rulesets, advanced rate limiting, exposed credential checks, uploaded content scanning, and other security measures.
SafeLine
SafeLine is a self-hosted WAF(Web Application Firewall) to protect your web apps from attacks and exploits.
A web application firewall helps protect web apps by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between a web application and the Internet. It typically protects web apps from attacks such as SQL injection, XSS, code injection, os command injection, CRLF injection, ldap injection, xpath injection, RCE, XXE, SSRF, path traversal, backdoor, bruteforce, http-flood, bot abused, among others.
ModSecurity
ModSecurity is a classic open-source WAF project and has been very popular for many years.
Technically, ModSecurity is not a "WAF" but a "WAF rule set". ModSecurity is the foundation of most WAFs; it does not include other common WAF features such as website management and log management, and it does not even have an interface. What ModSecurity has is only protection rules.
NAXSI
NAXSI means Nginx Anti XSS SQL Injection.
Technically, it is a third party nginx module, available as a package for many UNIX-like platforms. This module, by default, reads a small subset of simple and readable rules containing 99% of known patterns involved in website vulnerabilities.
As you may have noticed, the development of Naxsi has been stopped and the repository will be archived for historical reasons.
BunkerWeb
BunkerWeb based on NGINX under the hood, it will protect your web services to make them "secure by default". BunkerWeb integrates seamlessly into your existing environments and is fully configurable to meet your own use-cases .
BunkerWeb contains primary security features as part of the core but can be easily extended with additional ones thanks to a plugin system.
OpenAppSec
open-appsec is a machine learning security engine that preemptively and automatically prevents threats against Web Application & APIs.
The open-appsec engine learns how users normally interact with your web application. It then uses this information to automatically detect requests that fall outside of normal operations, and conducts further analysis to decide whether the request is malicious or not.
Upon every HTTP request, all parts are decoded, JSON and XML sections are extracted, and any IP-level access control is applied.
Haltdos WAF
Haltdos WAF CE is a free version by Haltdos. It is a high-performance WAF and WAAP solution designed to safeguard Web Applications and APIs. Unlike many other open-source WAF solutions in the list, Haltdos uses a new HTTP request processing engine designed for handling performance, creating complex rules, and mitigating sophisticated attacks. Supports complex attack mitigation techniques such as captcha, rate limiting, anomaly detection, redirection, request termination, and connection termination.
