

Find out in this report how the two Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
Overall, I can say the ROI includes a twenty-five to thirty percent cost reduction, with some areas achieving forty percent cost reduction in our expenses.
There is a significant performance improvement in the website and website speed.
With F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have not faced any RMAs, which has made a positive operational impact.
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.
This resulted in a drastic decrease in costs and, at the same time, the accuracy of the hits coming on HAProxy was almost around 100% or 99.99%.
I estimate seeing a return on investment with HAProxy, as it significantly reduced staff requirements and enhanced scaling capabilities, particularly when transitioning from NGINX, which faced issues.
I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as a perfect ten based on all of the experience I have had so far.
I rate customer support a 10 out of 10, as they are knowledgeable and provide straightforward troubleshooting.
Customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is excellent.
Since we are utilizing the open-source edition, community forums, mailing lists, and GitHub have been invaluable, with typically someone having encountered the same problems we faced.
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
It is the most scalable and reliable system.
Within ten minutes of time, we can scale and boot as many virtual machines as needed in the environment.
Being a virtual edition, we were able to scale resources such as CPU, memory, and throughput based on our demand without major architectural changes.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
The load balancing module still performed admirably.
The performance increased significantly and the response times of the application improved.
The uptime improvements with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are almost close to 100%, as it only goes down if a failover happens.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
We have reduced a lot of servers, replacing them with one or two HAProxy servers which deliver better performance, accuracy, and an almost 100% success rate with requests.
The primary concern I noted regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is its scalability during high-load situations.
It is a somewhat expensive solution, and the price needs to be improved based on what our customers have told us.
With FortiWeb, we have a dashboard where I can check the policy status with just one click, and everything is easily accessible.
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.
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's pricing structure was significantly more advantageous and aligned with our budgetary considerations.
My experience with pricing and setup costs for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition was mixed, as they do not have an option for 10 gig licensing, which was costly for us.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition solves a very significant problem of high availability and performance.
Since we use the open-source edition, there are no licensing fees, with the main cost being the infrastructure running on EC2 instances in AWS, which helps maintain low expenses.
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helped our customers increase the high availability and performance of their applications, specifically their web applications.
If ten thousand, fifty thousand, or even a million people want to access the application simultaneously, we have configured auto-scalability.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has impacted my organization positively with cost savings by saving public IP addresses, and its performance and stability, which give almost 100% uptime for the application because we have high availability.
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.
HAProxy positively impacted our organization by exceeding scalability expectations, initially projected at 200k requests but ultimately handling over 15 million transactions per second without any issues.
As a production engineer at that time, I definitely wanted to ensure that the system could handle massive connections, especially since we operated an e-commerce platform where we could not lose any customer calls.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| HAProxy | 8.9% |
| F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition | 1.3% |
| Other | 89.8% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 19 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition provides SSL offloading, load balancing, and high availability, enhancing security and performance. It supports advanced traffic management and monitoring tools, integrating easily and cost-effectively for flexible deployments across data centers.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is renowned for its security and performance integration. The platform's customization capabilities via iRules, combined with comprehensive traffic management tools, enable organizations to fine-tune their data management processes. Users benefit from load balancing and a robust application delivery infrastructure, ensuring high availability and application security. With strong documentation and a user-friendly interface, deployment and configurations are simplified. Although the platform offers significant benefits, there are opportunities to enhance areas such as load management, support, training, and licensing. Expansion of security features, particularly for SD-WAN and Azure integration, alongside improved logging and failover functions, would enhance its utility even further.
What are the standout features of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?In financial services, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is used to secure and optimize transaction flows, ensuring compliance and performance. Healthcare organizations employ it to manage sensitive data traffic securely and efficiently. Retailers balance e-commerce traffic, improving user experience and reliability during peak sales periods. Education institutions leverage it for web application protection and to support increasing online traffic demands.
HAProxy delivers reliability, high performance, and efficient load balancing solutions. Its open-source model ensures cost-effectiveness and scalability, ideal for managing extensive infrastructure demands with minimal latency while offering seamless integration with modern platforms.
HAProxy is renowned for its robust performance in load balancing across TCP and HTTP protocols, featuring multiple algorithms such as round-robin. Users appreciate its customizable configuration and seamless SSL termination, which make it an excellent choice for managing complex infrastructures. The platform's open-source nature supports scalability, reducing costs while providing flexible proxy operations. HAProxy efficiently handles high concurrency, enabling smooth traffic management and ensuring stability within diverse systems.
What key features does HAProxy offer?HAProxy is extensively used in load balancing implementations across various sectors. Companies deploy it for managing high traffic, Layer 4 and Layer 7 applications, and SQL databases. It supports microservices architecture, performs SSL offloading, and manages email services like SMTP. As a reverse proxy, HAProxy delivers high availability for systems like Redis, RabbitMQ, and Apache while integrating with Docker and Kubernetes. Its features enhance web application firewall capabilities and traffic routing, making it suitable for industries demanding reliable and efficient network management.
We monitor all Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.