A10 Networks Lightning ADC vs HAProxy comparison

A10 Networks Lightning ADC

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91% willing to recommend

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

A10 Networks Lightning ADC and HAProxy compete in the advanced load-balancing category. HAProxy appears to have an advantage due to its extensive feature set and robust support.

Features: A10 Networks Lightning ADC offers robust SSL offloading, advanced traffic analytics, and DDoS protection, fitting for high-demand settings. HAProxy provides flexible load balancing, high availability, and high-performance capabilities, including support for TCP and HTTP traffic, aided by its open-source nature and customization options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: A10 Networks Lightning ADC is recognized for seamless integration and a straightforward deployment process, backed by comprehensive customer service. HAProxy, while powerful, can present difficulties in deployment, necessitating skilled resources for optimal setups. A10 Networks provides more hands-on customer service to alleviate deployment stress compared to HAProxy.

Pricing and ROI: A10 Networks Lightning ADC typically involves higher initial setup costs, yet it offers significant ROI through advanced performance and security. HAProxy, being open-source, offers a cost-effective setup suitable for budget-sensitive organizations, though it might require additional investment in expert personnel for management. HAProxy combines low setup costs with high configurability, delivering favorable ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed A10 Networks Lightning ADC vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: June 2025).

A10 Networks Lightning ADC vs. HAProxy

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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)

17th

Average Rating

7.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HAProxy

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Service Mesh (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of A10 Networks Lightning ADC is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 12.4%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

RONALDO DE MELO

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.

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Kaushlendra Singh

Manager - IT Infrastructure and Network at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Used for load balancing, but its dashboard and reporting could be improved

We use the solution for load balancing The solution's implementation and troubleshooting are not easy. The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved. I have been using HAProxy for 12 years. We didn’t face any issues with the solution’s stability. I rate the solution’s stability an…

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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."

"The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."

"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."

"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."

"I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime."

"The solution is user-friendly and efficient."

"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."

"It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors."

"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."

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"The support from A10 should be improved."

"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."

"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."

"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."

"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."

"Documentation could be improved."

"The visibility could be improved."

"HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets."

"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."

"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The tool is open-source."

"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible."

"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."

"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."

"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."

"The product is open source."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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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 ...

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What do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

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Comparisons

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Compared 54% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs A10 Networks Lightning ADC

Compared 46% of the time

More A10 Networks Lightning ADC Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 14% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Download A10 Networks Lightning ADC product report

Download HAProxy product report

Also Known As

Lightning ADS

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

A cloud-native, software-defined solution that provides integrated advanced load-balancing, performance optimization, application security and per-application analytics to increase operational agility and application performance.

A10 Networks

HAProxy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the fastest and most popular and trusted software load balancer products in the marketplace today. Organizations are able to immediately deploy HAProxy solutions to enable websites and applications to optimize performance, security, and observability. HAProxy solutions are available to scale to any environment.

HAProxy is an open-source product and has a robust, active, reliable community. The solutions are continually tested and improved on by the community. HAProxy offers a dynamic design to support the most modern architectures, microservices, and deployment environments (appliances, containers, virtual, and cloud).

HAProxy utilizes a cloud-native protocol, which makes it a complete solution for cloud services such as Red Hat OpenShift, OVH, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more. It also can be used as the reference load balancer in OpenStack.

HAProxy Products

HAProxy One: This is a next-gen end-to-end application delivery platform created to secure and streamline modern application architectures. It offers a complete suite of solutions, such as application delivery software, turnkey, and appliance services observed and administered through a central control plane. The product supplies application acceleration, CDN, DDoS, bot management, WAF capabilities, and load balancing.

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane: This product enables organizations to streamline workflows, arrange traffic routing and security protocols, enhance the speed of delivery, and scale out of the organization’s applications. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane offers an intuitive user interface to observe and control the complete product lineup and API for administering numerous fleets of HAProxy Enterprise servers, either in the cloud or on premises.

HAProxy Edge: This product offering is an application delivery network (ADN) that provides a broad array of turnkey application services with amazing scale and complete visibility. Services include application and content acceleration, advanced security, and load balancing.

HAProxy ALOHA Hardware or Virtual Load Balancer: This product is a virtual load balancer or plug-and-play hardware constructed upon HAProxy Enterprise that is designed to support proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7. It has a user-friendly GUI, simple deployment, and no limit on backend servers, making it a complete product for organizations desiring a reliable system to provide high-end load distribution for critical services.

HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller: This product is designed to facilitate smooth traffic flow into a Kubernetes cluster. It is able to automatically discover anomalies and changes in an organization's Kubernetes infrastructure and provide precise distribution of traffic to healthy pods, with no downtime caused by poor pod health or scaling changes. The product comes with an embedded WAF to optimize the security of an organization’s applications running in Kubernetes.

HAProxy Enterprise: This product is the enterprise-class edition of HAProxy offering a dynamic and sturdy code base with next-generation features, an enterprise suite of add-ons, professional services, and trusted support.
- Cluster-wide tracking and rate limiting
- Advanced DDoS and bot management
- Web application firewall
- Reliable expert support
- High performance modules
- Device detection and geolocation
- Real-time dashboard

Reviews from Real Users

“Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind.” - Nathanel S., Platform Architect at SES

“I use HAProxy for individuals who can not buy low balancers. I built NFV in a box and send individuals a pathway into an HAProxy VM. The setup was not difficult; it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC. When it comes to pricing, HAProxy is free.” - Nasir O., Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.

Sample Customers

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A10 Networks Lightning ADC vs. HAProxy