We performed a comparison between HAProxy and NGINX Plus based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."
"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"Stability is number one."
"Scalable and inexpensive."
"What I like best about the product is its simplicity and speed. When you need to set up a load balancer quickly, HAProxy offers options like sticky sessions and round-robin. It's also fast to configure, including adding SSL for security. While it may have fewer options than other solutions like F5, HAProxy gets the job done for basic load-balancing tasks."
"The load balancing module, which is equivalent to LTM, is the focus of the PSE. So far, the features of both are identical. I believe NGINX has more features for securing these services, but in terms of load balancing, both are massive solutions."
"The best solution, by far, for web traffic control for things in production and just around the house."
"The product is lightweight and fast."
"The robust software architecture allows for it to be scalable and very stable."
"Supports IMAP, POP and SMTP protocols for the reverse proxy."
"I think installation only took a couple of minutes — no more than 10 minutes."
"It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX."
"Zero Downtime has always been a strength in recommending infrastructure web services. NGINX allows me to execute such infrastructure with less complications and the ability to switch from server to server easily."
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."
"The configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer."
"Improving the documentation with multiple examples and scenarios would be beneficial. Most users encounter similar situations, so having a variety of scenarios readily available on the tool's website would be helpful. For instance, if I were part of the HAProxy team, I'd create a webpage with different scenarios and provide files for each scenario. This way, users wouldn't have to start from scratch every time."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is."
"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"The KPI should be more focused on load balancing and the latency in application calling from the end system."
"I would like to see the Grafana integration in NGINX which is already present in HAProxy. Grafana integration will help the solution visualize all the data analytics on the dashboard which is currently not present."
"Make modules easier to enable or disable. The beauty and ugly side of the NGINX modules is you have to know how to compile the module. For beginners or non-very technical aspirant(s) going for NGINX, they have to learn how to compile the modules."
"It would be good if NGINX provided a graphical user interface."
"The scalability could be improved."
"Our most challenging part was to run an older PHP website reverse-proxied through NGINX. That was not fun."
"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 41 reviews while NGINX Plus is ranked 5th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 28 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while NGINX Plus is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NGINX Plus writes "Quick installation and very easy to manage while doing orchestration or automation". HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler, Envoy and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), whereas NGINX Plus is most compared with IIS, Kemp LoadMaster, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Apache Web Server and Citrix NetScaler. See our HAProxy vs. NGINX Plus report.
See our list of best Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) vendors.
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