Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs HAProxy comparison

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC and HAProxy are products designed to enhance application performance through efficient load balancing. While Barracuda excels in customer support and pricing, HAProxy is deemed superior due to its robust feature set.

Features: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is recognized for comprehensive security features, ease of use in handling SSL offloading, and application protection. HAProxy provides strong flexibility, advanced routing capabilities, and support for a wide range of protocols.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC offers seamless deployment with excellent technical support, ensuring minimal downtime. HAProxy, with extensive customization options, requires more technical expertise, impacting deployment time.

Pricing and ROI: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC has a higher initial setup cost but promises ROI through support services and bundled security features. HAProxy's lower upfront cost appeals to budget-conscious buyers, benefiting from its open-source nature for long-term savings, but may require technical expertise affecting operational costs. Barracuda provides a more predictable cost structure for quicker ROI, whereas HAProxy offers a financially lower barrier to entry.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: July 2025).

Barracuda Load Balancer 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

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

14th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

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 Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is 1.5%, up from 1.1% 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

Roni Wijaya

Vice President of It Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

A simple and powerful solution with WAF feature

The solution is simple and powerful. I find the Barracuda Load Balancer ADC's load balancing function most valuable. It balances the traffic well. The security features, like the Web Application Firewall, are also very helpful. I use the SSL offloading feature too. It's very helpful because it prevents overload. Our application runs on HTTP, but we upload HTTPS on the load balancer. This means there are no performance issues. I think it's very helpful.

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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

"The solution is simple and powerful. I find the Barracuda Load Balancer ADC's load balancing function most valuable. It balances the traffic well. The security features, like the Web Application Firewall, are also very helpful."

"I would rate the stability of Barracuda Load Balancer as a ten out of ten; it has high stability."

"The price is very good, and it's not very expensive."

"Barracuda's technical support is good - whenever we have an issue, they immediately connect and resolve it."

"The most useful features in Barracuda Load Balancer are its security capabilities, load balancing efficiency, and scalability."

"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."

"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."

"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."

"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."

"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."

"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."

"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."

"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic."

"The Barracuda Load Balancer ADC could be improved with more customization features. For example, F5 uses iRules for custom configurations. I haven't found something similar in Barracuda yet. The load balancer and WAF's basic and common features are enough, but we need more customization options."

"There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic."

"The quality of the solution's performance could be improved."

"Load Balancer ADC is competitively priced, but it's not feature-rich, and its technology is not that advanced."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved."

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

"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs."

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

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Load Balancer ADC is cost-effective and is about half the price of F5."

"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."

"It is free of cost."

"HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."

"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."

"The tool is open-source."

"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

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

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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865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Educational Organization

Retailer

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

Pricing for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC can be a consideration. However, it offers good value with its cost-saving benefits and efficient operation, balancing the initial financial outlay.

What needs improvement with Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic. Also, more could be done to enhance the initial setup, as it can be c...

What is your primary use case for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

The typical use case for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC involves managing and distributing network traffic efficiently to maintain system performance. Clients use Barracuda Load Balancer ADC for its a...

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

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

July 2025

Download Barracuda Load Balancer ADC product report

Download HAProxy product report

August 2025

Also Known As

Barracuda Load Balancer

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

Barracuda Load Balancer is ideal for organizations looking for a high-performance, yet cost-effective application delivery and security solution. With the broadest range of hardware and virtual models, Barracuda Load Balancer provides maximum flexibility for organizations looking to build highly secure and scalable application infrastructure, whether it's deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

Barracuda 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

Fenwal Blood Technologies

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