F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and HAProxy both compete in the load balancing category. F5 LTM appears to have the upper hand in advanced features and application integration, while HAProxy is preferred for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness.
Features: F5 BIG-IP LTM offers advanced scripting through iRules for customizable traffic management, includes modules like Web Application Firewall and SSL Offloading, and provides integration capabilities with applications such as Oracle PeopleSoft. HAProxy, on the other hand, is known for its high reliability and stability, offering multiple load balancing algorithms and a straightforward open-source solution with options for enterprise support.
Room for Improvement: F5 BIG-IP LTM is often criticized for its high cost and complex licensing, along with a challenging initial setup. Users call for better reporting tools and enhancements in its GUI. HAProxy's management interface is generally straightforward but could improve in dynamic configuration and logging, with better documentation and monitoring to enhance user experience.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 BIG-IP LTM is renowned for its rich feature set and extensive use in various deployments, although the initial setup can be difficult. Technical support is mixed with varying reviews on responsiveness. HAProxy offers straightforward deployment for on-premises and cloud environments, and its customer service is well-rated for simplicity and fewer support dependencies due to its open-source nature.
Pricing and ROI: F5 BIG-IP LTM is a premium product with a cost that reflects its capabilities, although some users find it prohibitive compared to competitors. It offers compelling performance and feature set for its price. HAProxy, being primarily open-source, provides an attractive cost benefit with its free version, making it a cost-effective solution for those seeking reliability without high expenses. The enterprise version of HAProxy offers additional functionality at a much lower cost than F5, providing a good ROI for budget-conscious organizations.
The major return on investment is the security of our data.
Operational efficiency has improved; we no longer have staff consistently monitoring backend servers during deployment or scaling events, as HAProxy's health checks and hitless reloads allow us to push changes with minimal manual intervention.
I would rate the technical support of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) nine out of ten.
I would rate community support as strong, but if guaranteed SLAs or direct assistance are required, then enterprise support would be the go-to option.
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The configuration syntax is powerful yet can become overwhelming for newcomers; a more beginner-friendly interface or a native GUI without relying on third-party tools would ease the onboarding process.
The product is costly.
We haven't opted for HAProxy Enterprise yet, so there are no licensing complexities.
One of the most beneficial features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is its ability to identify compromised traffic and its capabilities in authentication.
By moving all SSL termination to the load balancer, I now manage certificates in a single place, and I can also utilize Let's Encrypt with HAProxy's built-in ACME support, making renewal automatic.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) | 16.1% |
| HAProxy | 11.1% |
| Other | 72.8% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 62 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 31 |
| Large Enterprise | 84 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 13 |
| Large Enterprise | 15 |
F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.
BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.
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
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.
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