A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs HAProxy comparison

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A10 Networks Thunder ADC

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

A10 Networks Thunder ADC and HAProxy compete in the load balancing and traffic management category. A10 Networks holds the upper hand due to its robust security features and integrated licensing compared to HAProxy's open-source and customizable approach lacking inbuilt security.

Features: A10 Networks Thunder ADC offers an all-inclusive licensing model, advanced traffic management, and optional security features through third-party firewalls. It provides DDoS protection and IPv6 support. HAProxy provides efficient load balancing, protocol-level traffic handling, and advanced LB algorithms, focusing on customization through scripting.

Room for Improvement: A10 Networks faces challenges with limited third-party integrations and potential support delays due to overseas centers. HAProxy needs improved logging, user-friendly documentation, and robust security features, with a more modular design and native cluster support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: A10 Networks boasts strong support, although some users note response delays. On-premises deployment is common and support services receive positive ratings. HAProxy enables flexible deployment across environments but relies heavily on community support, with paid support available for critical needs.

Pricing and ROI: A10 Networks is cost-effective compared to F5, offering an ROI through simplified configuration and reduced operational costs. HAProxy's open-source nature results in affordability, with expenses focused on optional paid support or advanced features, providing a cost-effective solution for performant load balancing.

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

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs. HAProxy

July 2025

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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 Thunder ADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

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 August 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of A10 Networks Thunder ADC is 4.9%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 11.9%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

RonaldoDE Melo

Sales Account Executive at L8 Group

Protects connection and servers from direct access with control access feature

The initial setup is very simple. The issue is that it achieves high output across all its features, specifically the output ports. This affects the customer's solution because sometimes, the customer is even aware of the user's activity on certain servers. If you have all the necessary information, we can quickly deploy the solution within two to three days. The size of the Thunder ADC depends on its configuration. For example, the cache converter typically includes more than two rack units, often requiring at least three rack units for adequate space. I rate it a ten out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

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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…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The SLB and GSLB load balancing are the most valuable features. They meet our need to do server-side load balancing and global site load balancing so we can distribute traffic, not only intra-data center, but inter-data center."

"We can control access based on the specific application. If other devices are attempting to directly access the servers, you can block them. Additionally, you can balance the load among servers to optimize performance. For example, utilizing caching can make the application run faster."

"For the past two and a half years, we have not had a need to open a tech support ticket. It is really stable. In the past, our experience with tech support was that they were extremely helpful."

"The Deterministic CGNAT feature is valuable for us."

"The Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) is simple to use."

"The most valuable features in A10 Networks Thunder ADC are the ease of configuration, user-friendliness, and simplicity to sell to customers."

"Feature-wise, A10 Networks Thunder ADC is better for troubleshooting...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."

"It helps with the efficiency of application deployments and data security."

More A10 Networks Thunder ADC pros

"Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind."

"Advanced traffic rules, including stick tables and ACLs, which allow me to shape traffic while it's load balanced."

"HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime."

"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"

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

"The solution is user-friendly and efficient."

"The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice."

"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"A10 Networks Thunder ADC could improve on the Application Delivery Controller. it's not a fully-fledged web application firewall solution. For example, application data and support need to improve."

"There is room for improvement in the GUI. I just migrated from the 2.7 software train to the 4.1, and there are still people on 2.7. The latter is a very old GUI if you compare it to F5. It's not as easy to use and a lot of things are missing. They've made a lot of improvements in the 4.1 step, but compared to the ease of use of F5, it's still quite difficult. For people who haven't got a lot of experience, the GUI can be quite challenging."

"It scaled well for our numbers, up to 3 million subscribers for our most crowded region but I would like to see the same scalability numbers for the virtualized version as well."

"We are starting to do a lot with containers and how the solution hooks into Kubernetes that we haven't explored. I'm hoping that they have a lot of hooks into Kubernetes. That would be the part for improvement: Marketing use cases with containers."

"The solution should add automation features in the next release."

"Traffic flow issues are very difficult, as there's no means for us to analyze the traffic coming in or out of the appliance without technical support."

"The product is expensive."

"In my opinion, they need to improve their cloud support. There is support for cloud, but not all functions are there, such as high-availability."

More A10 Networks Thunder ADC cons

"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."

"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."

"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."

"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."

"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."

"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 logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."

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

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution costs less than its competitors."

"The price of the maintenance support is too expensive."

"The price is good they are very comparative."

"You get a lot more for your dollar with A10."

"The pricing is a third of the price of the F5 competition."

"We just pay for support in addition to our licensing."

"Pricing is one of the features of the product that influence customers to use the product."

"The pricing is fine, considering the features they are providing. If you are an individual user, they'll price the product differently compared to how they price the product that is sold to an organization."

More A10 Networks Thunder ADC pricing and cost advice

"The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."

"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."

"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."

"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."

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

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

"The product is open source."

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

University

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

I would recommend A10 Networks due that it delivers high performance in a small form factor to reduce OPEX with significantly lower power usage, rack space, and cooling requirements compared to oth...

Do you recommend A10 Networks Thunder ADC?

I do recommend A10 Networks Thunder ADC. It's very user-friendly, easy to configure, and flexible. It is a very useful solution - especially now, when a lot of employees are working remotely. I hav...

What do you like most about A10 Networks Thunder ADC?

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is an easy-to-use and flexible solution.

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?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

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Product Reports

Download A10 Networks Thunder ADC product report

A10 Networks Thunder ADC

July 2025

Download HAProxy product report

August 2025

Also Known As

Thunder ADC, AX Series

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is a dynamic application delivery controller and advanced load balancer. Thunder ADC is a value-added solution provided by A10 Networks specializing in robust, trusted, scalable application services for cloud, hybrid, edge cloud, and on-premise environments focused on improving business processes and keeping infrastructures safe. The solution consistently provides server availability, improves content delivery, and protects at-risk applications. A10 Networks Thunder ADC easily controls hybrid and multi-cloud deployments using a Polynimbus strategy to minimize difficulties and costs for IT processes, facilitating overall improved business results.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is effective for small to medium businesses (SMBs) to large enterprises. Service providers and cloud operators are all using A10 Network ADC to manage their large and fast-growing group of business-critical applications.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC supplies L4-7 load balancing with numerous layers of security using DNS and web app firewalls, comprehensive support for advanced encryption, single sign-on (SSO) authentication, and high-performance Perfect Forward Secrecy and Error Correction Code (PFS/ECC). Thunder ADC is designed upon A10 Networks Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS®) platform to provide consistent, efficient application performance and trusted security for any environment.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC Benefits

Consistently accessible: A10 Networks Thunder ADC employs numerous load balancing protocols to evenly distribute workloads to all servers and works to ensure constant application functionality. User requests are monitored to ensure loads are directed to the appropriate server so that there is always a proper response delivery to content. This process ensures the applications are consistently available.
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB): To ensure business processes are fully optimized at all times, A10 Networks Thunder ADC employs a dynamic Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) process to augment server load balancing capabilities throughout global data centers for high availability and improved user experience and application tolerance.
Fast content delivery: A10 Networks Thunder ADC conquers the general WAN latencies, chatty policies, and redundant software programs to ensure quick and responsive service. Employees receive a fast, excellent end-user experience while the organization's business leaders get exceeded SLA mandates and increased productivity with teams working remotely and a step up on the competition.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC Features

Detailed Analytics: When deployed with A10 Networks Harmony Controller, Thunder ADC delivers a large selection of detailed aggregate and per-request reports in real time. The reports include popular URLs, error and health indicators, latencies, and end-to-end response times. The data is further dissected to deliver per-app reporting, availability alerts, and performance.
API Coverage: Thunder ADC utilizes A10 Networks REST-based aXAPIs to structure all features with 100 percent API coverage. The resulting interface is then used to seamlessly integrate custom or third-party management solutions, such as VMware or other SDN platforms, OpenStack, Microsoft SCVMM, or other cloud orchestration systems. There are also software plug-ins available for private clouds utilizing VMware’s vRealize Orchestrator.
Comprehensive Management Controls: Thunder ADC is fully supported by A10 Networks Harmony Controller and can be deployed in software or as a software-as-a-service (SaaS). This controller functions as a native management platform that organizes and distributes application-centric service protocols and configuration data to numerous Thunder appliances and device cluster infrastructures throughout numerous multi-cloud environments. Users can instantly identify, audit and track every appliance using critical operational metrics, such as CPU, disk usage, device partitions, and end users. The A10 Networks Harmony Controller will also complete configuration backups and restore operations, and will schedule regular software upgrades.

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

123inkt.nl, Bentley University, Box, Brainshark, Buienradar, Capgemini, CGN/LSN & NAT64, Chengdu Telecom, Club One, Code Ready, CRC Health Group, Cyso, Deutsche Telekom, Earth Class Mail, Excite, FFF Enterprises, Florence County, Framingham State University, From30

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