Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs HAProxy comparison

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: September 2025).

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. HAProxy

September 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)

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (11th), Bot Management (5th), Service Mesh (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 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 11.3%, 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
Product	Market Share (%)
HAProxy	11.3%
Barracuda Load Balancer ADC	1.5%
Other	87.2%

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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Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks

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 reliability features of HAProxy were particularly useful in a scenario where I needed to test load balancing between two Tomcats. Since these domains were inaccessible, I set up a third Docker with HAProxy, which had access to the Tomcat domains. I then configured HAProxy to handle the load balancing. This setup allowed the client to interact with HAProxy. The solution's integration with other elements is easy.

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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

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

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

"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 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."

"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."

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

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

"The features I find valuable in this solution are session control which automatically disconnects users that forget to log off, and the ability to write rules to either allow or block certain file requests."

"It is scalable."

"Stability is number one."

"We use the solution for load balancing."

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

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."

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

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

"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."

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

"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."

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

"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"

"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."

"There are three main areas to improve: 1) Make remote management more modern by adding API. 2) Propose a general HA solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this). 3) Thread option should be a bit more stable."

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

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

"It is free of cost."

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

"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."

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

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

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

"The tool is open-source."

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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867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

11%

Educational Organization

Media Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	15

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.

NetScaler vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

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Product Reports

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

August 2025

Download Barracuda Load Balancer ADC product report

Download HAProxy product report

September 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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