HAProxy vs NGINX Plus vs NetScaler comparison

HAProxy and NetScaler are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. HAProxy is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.6, while NetScaler is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. HAProxy holds a 12.3% mindshare in ADC, compared to NetScaler’s 14.6% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of HAProxy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of NetScaler users who would recommend it.

HAProxy

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

5,812 Views
3,746 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

NetScaler

Read 107 NetScaler reviews

6,425 Views
4,740 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

NGINX Plus

Read 31 NGINX Plus reviews

2,818 Views
2,383 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

HAProxy

NetScaler

NGINX Plus

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HAProxy, NetScaler, and NGINX Plus based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetScaler, F5, Microsoft and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

June 2025

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Helped 860,632 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 12.3%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetScaler is 14.6%, down from 16.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 7.4%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

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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DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU

Cloud Consultant at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking

Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

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Michael Olayemi

Senior Software Engineer at Checkit

Enables public access and secure configurations through reverse proxy

The primary valuable feature of NGINX for me is its ability to provide a reverse proxy. I have found that this feature supports our local server, and I am able to connect through our DNS system, making it accessible publicly. Additionally, the integration with SSL certificates and the configuration capabilities make it a valuable solution for my use case. Without NGINX, users would not be able to access our application, which means there is positive ROI from using NGINX as it is crucial for the functioning of my organization.

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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

"It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions."

"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."

"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."

"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."

"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."

"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 improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."

"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."

More HAProxy pros

"The most valuable feature of Citrix ADC is its ease of use."

"We use the product for load balancing and as a reverse proxy solution."

"The feature that I have found most valuable is its load balancing."

"High availability, performance, and security are the main pillars. It enhances the security for accessing the applications."

"I can turn on features without actually owning a license. I can test them out, I can use them for a while, and then I can be licensed up. That's awesome. I don't have to have a license immediately before I can start to deploy things rapidly, rapid deployment is a plus."

"It has helped us to increase the resiliency of the application and the performance."

"Content Switching provides flexibility for routing traffic as desired to designated real servers. It also provides good geo capabilities through its GSLB feature."

"If you need PCI-compliance and have high security requirements, WAF is the most valuable feature. If you need to monitor your load-balancing services with complex types of monitoring, make sure everything is alright, and load balancing is important, Content Switching and Monitoring features are the keys to your needs. If you want to provide a lot of static images or data, the Caching feature works best for you."

More NetScaler pros

"Nginx is simple to configure, very stable in a highly utilized environment and very modular, allowing DevOps to create it's own modules for interactive use with Nginx."

"Nginx is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles."

"I receive very good support."

"The overall product rating is ten out of ten."

"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."

"Its versatility and capabilities make it invaluable for implementing patches and fixes when necessary."

"I think installation only took a couple of minutes — no more than 10 minutes."

"Supports IMAP, POP and SMTP protocols for the reverse proxy."

More NGINX Plus pros

Cons

"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."

"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."

"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."

"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

More HAProxy cons

"Quality assurance could improve by ironing out security vulnerabilities before releasing upgrades."

"There is room for improvement regarding the pricing policy for Citrix offices."

"Citrix is more expensive than Horizon."

"Manageability and adaptability can also be challenging for end customers."

"Getting to use some of the advanced tools, even with the assistance of Citrix support, can be challenging."

"I will try to migrate all the tools to the cloud because there is more lab and more VPN scalability available in the cloud. It is not available on-premises."

"In every release - and it doesn't matter if it's a minor release or a major release - they keep moving things around and they keep changing the mechanism. So certain things can work in one version one way, and everything works really well, then when you upgrade it to the next version, it breaks everything because they have a new way of doing it."

"Too many bugs in the software and it's always difficult when you need to update."

More NetScaler cons

"I would like the configuration process to be more simplified."

"Our most challenging part was to run an older PHP website reverse-proxied through NGINX. That was not fun."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."

"The solution's GUI is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement."

"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."

"The KPI should be more focused on load balancing and the latency in application calling from the end system."

"Only improvement needed that I would point to is scalability. With it, I mean clusterized organisation on a low level. At the moment, the best alternative is RHEL HA."

"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."

More NGINX Plus cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is open source."

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

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

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

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

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

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

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

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"We have a yearly licencing fee, and there are no additional costs."

"It's an expensive product but it works well."

"We get value for money. Its price is fair. I don't think it is overpriced."

"Price-wise, I feel that the solution is a little bit expensive."

"Its licensing cost is much higher than other products, but it is acceptable because it is a one-time investment, and we are getting our requirements fulfilled when we buy this product. So, there is no issue with the pricing."

"The firewall license is included by default, with no additional costs."

"Our licensing fees including technical support are approximately $3,500 USD."

"Regarding pricing, while it's expensive, I can't comment on the exact ROI without a budget analysis. However, in terms of service quality, it's worth the price."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

"The cost is reasonable."

"NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it."

"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours."

"It's an open source solution, so it's free."

"HAProxy is cheaper than NGINX."

"NGINX Plus is worth it, if you need it. If you do not need the features or support, the free and open source package is more than capable. "

"NGINX Plus is an open-source solution with limited additional features. When you try to get additional features in the solution, then you need to pay an extra amount to NGINX Plus."

"I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost."

More NGINX Plus pricing and cost advice

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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

11%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

17%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

See all answers

What do you like most about Citrix ADC?

The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic ente...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADC?

After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexi...

See all answers

Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?

IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architectur...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX Plus?

It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?

My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 14% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs HAProxy

Compared 6% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 10% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler

Compared 9% of the time

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

Compared 8% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

Radware Alteon vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

More NetScaler Competitors

IIS vs NGINX Plus

Compared 16% of the time

Apache Web Server vs NGINX Plus

Compared 12% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs NGINX Plus

Compared 11% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs NGINX Plus

Compared 9% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NGINX Plus

Compared 5% of the time

More NGINX Plus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

June 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

June 2025

Download NetScaler product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX Plus

June 2025

Download NGINX Plus product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall

NGINX

Overview

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.

HAProxy

One platform for a consistent application delivery and security experience because nobody has time to learn multiple systems to manage ADC deployments. NetScaler is built with a single code base using a software-based architecture, so no matter which ADC form factor you choose — hardware, virtual machine, bare metal, or container — the behavior will be the same.

NetScaler

NGINX Plus is a versatile solution that offers load balancing, caching, proxying, and API deployment capabilities. It can be deployed on private or public clouds and is ideal for building CDN solutions. The solution can also be used to secure web applications and replace web services like Apache.

NGINX has helped organizations improve functioning, reduce downtimes, and offer a DevOps-friendly solution. Its community support and documentation are highly regarded, and its configuration is more straightforward, making it a recommended choice over HAProxy.

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp

ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk

Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

June 2025

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