# CrowdSec

11 Hacker News commenters recommended CrowdSec and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Blocks attacking IPs using crowdsourced reputation data; people run its free version as a simple WAF and free blocklists. Critics cite false positives and a source code leak.

## Why people recommend it

- Blocks bots and random scraping (4 comments): "I use the free version as a simple WAF on multiple servers and it blocks a lot of bots." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743665)) "Set up Crowdsec as WAF and subscribe to their free blocklists to filter out bots" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49584749)) "Cloudflare and or crowdsec can cover 99% of bot and traffic issues." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496648))
- Free version and free blocklists (2 comments): "I use the free version as a simple WAF on multiple servers and it blocks a lot of bots." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743665)) "Set up Crowdsec as WAF and subscribe to their free blocklists to filter out bots" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49584749))
- Suggested as effective fail2ban-style tool (2 comments): "something like fail2ban or crowdsec would probably be more effective here" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938712)) "set up something like CrowdSec" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769242))

## What people warn about

- False positives block legitimate users (2 comments): "The architecture is sound, but it ended up having an unacceptable false positive rate for us." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743364)) "We had a lot of legitimate users end up blocked." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49744241))
- Source code leak and undisclosed breach (3 comments): "they didnt bothered to tell anyone about it since May until it the git was leaked and published" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771950)) "a security company leaking its own source code is quite the look" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49749305)) "it seems like a reason for me to never use the vendor" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49744884))
- Costly SaaS tie-in (2 comments): "Paying $1900/month for an IP address blocklist for a website? Yikes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48912273)) "rather than tie myself more tightly to their SaaS platform" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49744063))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [fail2ban](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fail2ban.md): 29 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "CrowdSec", https://hackerapproved.com/p/crowdsec/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).