We performed a comparison between F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), HAProxy, and Loadbalancer.org based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Citrix, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)."The load balancing function, the monitors that you can create, and iRules programmability are most valuable."
"The stability is excellent."
"It improves the overall performance of applications by decreasing the burden on servers associated with managing and maintaining applications and network sessions, as well as by performing application-specific tasks."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Valuable features include Link Controller and Server Load Balancer."
"The most valuable feature is the proxy."
"Traffic Learning is the most valuable feature."
"LTM's most valuable features include application security, data collection, and parameter-level rules."
"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."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."
"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"
"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."
"The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this."
"Advanced traffic rules, including stick tables and ACLs, which allow me to shape traffic while it's load balanced."
"It does what it’s supposed to do which is balancing an important intranet site we are using, so if one server dies, the second becomes active straight away."
"We can more easily set up a test environment, because you can easily configure your forms. It makes it more flexible for us, to convert our test environment to a production environment, without having to change DNSs on the outside. You just configure the forms on the inside. So without changing the actual endpoint for the end user, we can create completely different networks in the background."
"For now, it's stable."
"We now get notifications when pool members go down, and we eliminate our downtime by not sending traffic to downed pool members."
"The user interface precludes need to be well versed with Linux IPVS command line. This make it easy for junior team members to participate in managing load balancing needs."
"We have about 30,000 connections going through at any one time and it's fine, it doesn't seem to sweat. It doesn't get overloaded."
"I found scalability in Loadbalancer.org valuable."
"It's pretty much a Swiss Army knife for managing all the load balancing techniques."
"The web interface could be better."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would expect more integration with different platforms and more integration with the backend systems. Additionally, in the next release, I would like a more secure version."
"The pricing could always be better. It's a bit expensive."
"They could improve the product's ease of use. There is some confusion how to operate it."
"The solution's hardware quality needs improvement."
"The initial setup can take a long time."
"The management interface is unclear, complex, and not concise. I would like a better user interface."
"Security and Reporting."
"The product does not have any new technologies."
"Documentation could be improved."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"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 configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"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."
"There are many features you can set in the backend of Loadbalancer. They should simplify the configuration. The administrator should be able to configure it more simply. How it is now, you can only configure it if you have a lot of experience."
"They're mostly designed to balance a particular type of traffic. I wanted to load balance DNS, and they just don't do it the way that we wanted to. So they're not used as DNS load balancers."
"If I have to say something, I suppose they could add an automated configuration backup to an FTP location (or something similar) so you don’t have to manually do it. I don’t see this as a problem, of course, as the configuration rarely changes and we only need one backup, but maybe for other users that feature would be handy."
"It doesn't have the bonding capability feature."
"You can run into an issue when one engineer passes the case over to another engineer after their shift and they don't know what the first engineer worked on up to that point."
"I'd like to see scalability improved; it can be costly."
"I would like it if Loadbalancer had the ability to make rules for specific shared bots."
"The configuration is somewhat complicated. Someone who does not know the solution may find this challenging."
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