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A10 Networks Lightning ADC vs HAProxy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

A10 Networks Lightning ADC
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
18th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HAProxy
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (7th), Service Mesh (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of A10 Networks Lightning ADC is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 9.9%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HAProxy9.9%
A10 Networks Lightning ADC1.1%
Other89.0%
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

RONALDO DE MELO - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Account Executive at l8
Efficient application security while optimizing connections
The initial setup is simple; it is not complex. The configuration itself is simple and can be done in a couple of hours. However, the migration of the system to A10 Networks takes longer due to critical applications. Clients prefer to move them one by one, which is why it takes a significant amount of time. The configuration itself is simple, especially for this application.
Shrinivas Devarkonda - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
Handles high traffic efficiently and simplifies complex routing with rule-based logic
I think HAProxy is good as it stands now, but I believe there could be improvements. gRPC has recently been implemented, which is great, along with TLS 1.2 and 1.3 support, and HTTP 2.0 is also available. However, I'm unsure about the benchmark of those HTTP 2.0 requests on HAProxy. If there were any other protocol with better performance than HTTP 2.0, or perhaps mTLS and other similar features, including that in HAProxy would be really great. For improvements, I think that during setup and configuration, the steps provided are neat and clear. Anyone can easily install and configure it. There are many kernel tuning parameters also available, which is great. For specific improvement, in terms of logging, I think printing the full object of the request may help, or if there's a way to reference two requests, it would be beneficial to find a complete session history from a logged-in customer, as it would help analyze customer and user analytics.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Our clients appreciate that this is a security enabled solution."
"It allows you to secure the application while balancing the connections for many other customers, reducing CPU usage and server load."
"What I like about Lightning ADC, is that instead of having a big appliance sitting in front of the Kubernetes cluster, Lightning can pretty much go inside of Kubernetes."
"Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development."
"HAProxy positively impacted our organization by exceeding scalability expectations, initially projected at 200k requests but ultimately handling over 15 million transactions per second without any issues."
"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is that it works for my use case of application load balancing. I'm using it for PeerSense, and it's easy enough for PeerSense."
"The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB-algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none."
"It solves a problem for me where I can build files, not based on the health of the check, but rather the speed of the check."
"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."
"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."
 

Cons

"A10 documentation is not as open and accessible as AWS and Azure documentation is."
"We would like to see some improvement in the rapidity with which we can customize security facts within the solution."
"The support from A10 should be improved."
"There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment."
"The solution can be improved by controlling TCP behavior better and mandating to clients what the expected outcome must be in order to avoid receiving contestant timeout logs."
"​It needs proper HTTP/2 support.​"
"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."
"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."
"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."
"While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source."
"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."
"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."
"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."
"HAProxy is an open-source solution."
"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Do you recommend HAProxy?
I do recommend HAProxy for more simple applications or for companies with a low budget, since HAProxy is a free, open-source product. HAProxy is also a good choice for someone looking for a stable ...
What do you like most about HAProxy?
The solution is effective in managing our traffic.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?
Since we used the open-source version, we were not concerned about pricing, setup cost, or licensing.
 

Also Known As

Lightning ADS
HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about A10 Networks Lightning ADC vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,425 professionals have used our research since 2012.