Fortinet FortiADC vs HAProxy comparison

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Fortinet FortiADC

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiADC and HAProxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiADC vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: July 2024).

Fortinet FortiADC vs. HAProxy

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Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

8th

Average Rating

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HAProxy

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Service Mesh (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiADC is 11.5%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 14.1%, up from 13.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Unique Categories:

No other categories found

Service Mesh

10.6%

Featured Reviews

Saeid Khanipour Ghobani

IT Manager at Technology Evaluation Center

Sep 9, 2022

High-level load balancing and routing protocols but scalability is limited to 200 gigabits

The initial setup and configuration are very easy because the solution includes a simple OS. Initial configuration takes about ten minutes for simple environments. It is important to assess the environment and decide what services, servers, and web applications are needed. The solution can be configured in router mode or one-arm mode which uses source NAT as destination NAT to send traffic to the firewall. One-arm mode is more complex and requires discussions with our engineers. For example, you have a website with Node.js for your programming language, Amazon S3 for your CDN, NGINX for your web server, and you use both React and reCAPTCHA. Our team meets with your developer to learn your website and OS through a multi-step process and then we configure the solution to protect everything.

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reviewer2021271

Software Engineer at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 3, 2024

Helps distribute the server load but has only the basic features

The solution is used for high availability. We use it for the backend to distribute the load We needed a simple proxy system that is open source. HAProxy was the most used tool for any issues that we ran into. We did not want to use something that was not used much so that we could fix the issues…

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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

"The GSLB, the DR side, is the best part. Because we had our main side in one city, we created another, and we had a complete MPLS over the internet. We used the GSLB and data loss for our business applications."

"Ease of use in deploying and having it up and running requires minimal knowledge."

"The product has flexible and interesting licensing options."

"From a technical perspective, it is the most scalable device from Fortinet."

"Although FortiADC has multiple features that I like, the global DNS is the most helpful. It is primarily useful for customers with huge environments and at least two data centers. FortiADC can act as your DNS server. It can check which data center has the lowest latency, and route traffic to that one. It's an intelligent DNS."

"The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily."

"Content caching and content compression are good features."

"Key features include SSL Offloading, VM availability, and L7 load balancing."

More Fortinet FortiADC pros

"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."

"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."

"The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice."

"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."

"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."

"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."

"The solution is user-friendly and efficient."

"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"Because it is so generic, the documentation requires special attention. A person who has not worked on Fortinet FortiADC or a similar product will struggle to understand what the document is trying to say. The documentation could be more specific, and more detailed."

"The solution should improve finding false positives and false negatives. There are a lot of false positives."

"The solution needs to integrate sFlow. sFlow provides better visualization of the bandwidth and types of traffic passing through the device. When used in the traffic path, this information can be really useful."

"The L7 Persistent load-balancing algorithm has not worked for me after having tested it many times with my customer's in-house application. I'd like to suggest that the company make sure that all load-balancing algorithms work properly with most applications, even those that are in-house apps."

"It would be good if they built in a fully functional web application firewall."

"The initial setup could be simplified."

"The configuration is relatively complex."

"The solution's WAF needs an upgrade because it is not as good as FortiWeb, VMware, F5, or Imperva."

More Fortinet FortiADC cons

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment."

"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe the price is good. It's fair. There are no extra costs."

"The solution's pricing is an issue and should be improved."

"The price is competitive"

"They offer a perpetual license."

"The product has average pricing. I rate its pricing a five out of ten."

"Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better."

"The solution is less expensive than F5 or Imperva and is the most reasonably priced option available."

"I rate Fortinet FortiADC's pricing one out of ten. It is fixed."

More Fortinet FortiADC pricing and cost advice

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

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

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

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

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

"The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

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

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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793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.

Do you recommend Fortinet FortiADC?

I recommend Fortinet FortiADC. My experience with Fortinet has been very positive. Our company has been using it for around five years. We mainly use FortiADC for the load balancing of application ...

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiADC?

The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily.

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?

The product is open source.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Fortinet FortiADC

Comparisons

Compared 25% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 23% of the time

NetScaler vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 16% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 7% of the time

NGINX Plus vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 3% of the time

More Fortinet FortiADC Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 17% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 15% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Radware Alteon vs HAProxy

Compared 3% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Fortinet FortiADC

Download Fortinet FortiADC product report

Download HAProxy product report

Also Known As

FortiADC Application Delivery Controller, FortiADC

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Learn More

Fortinet

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Overview

Fortinet FortiADC is a robust application delivery controller (ADC) that delivers application optimization, application security, and application availability. FortiADC is a valued offering from Fortinet, which is widely recognized as a trusted supplier of dynamic security solutions worldwide. FortiADC offers dynamic security functions (AV, DDoS, and WAF) in addition to advanced application connectors for a simplified deployment and complete transparency to an organization's networks and applications. FortiADC offers three primary deployment options: physical machine, virtual machine, (VM) and cloud solution options.

Fortinet FortiADC Benefits

FortiADC security protocol: FortiADC integrates with FortiSandbox to improve the overall antivirus security protections where every file is scanned for known and unknown malicious risks. If a file is identified as malicious or problematic, it will be blocked in the future.
SSL protocol: FortiADC securely uses the most up-to-date cryptography to provide exceptional encryption and decryption using a hardware-based SSL ASIC. FortiADC offers complete transparency to inspect all traffic for threats, improves server response time, and reduces backend server load, SSL inspection and SSL offloading. FortiADC integrates seamlessly with Gemalto’s SafeNet Hardware Security Module (HSM).
FortiADC connectors: FortiADC Fabric Connectors offer open API-based integration and coordination with numerous software-defined networks (SDNs), third-party partners, and cloud management providers. Fortinet Fabric Connectors provide deep open and turnkey integration with recognized third-party vendors such as AWS, K8s, OCI, and SAP, in multi-vendor solutions, improving scalability, simplified management, and automation.
Business stability: FortiADC load balancing for on-premise global server load balancing (GSBL) and in the cloud (FortiGSBL Cloud) will ensure users can maintain a reliable and available network by improving the ability of scaling applications throughout numerous data centers to reduce application response times and enhance disaster recovery. Users are able to define protocols based on network latency concerns, overall data performance, and site availability.

Fortinet FortiADC Features

Application availability
- 4-7 application load balancing: DNS, HTTPS, RTMP, RADIUS, MySQL and more
- External fabric connectors: Splunk Integration, AWS/OCI Connector, Kubernetes Service.
- Security fabric connectors: FortiSIEM, Fortigate BanIP Integration, FortiAnalyzer, and more.
- Deployment modes: High availability (AA/AP Failover), Router mode, transparent mode (switch), one-arm mode (proxy with X-forwarded for support.
Web application firewall (WAF)
- Security services: Captcha support, cookie support, HTTP header security, XML/SOAP/JSON validation, CSRF protection, API gateway, and more.
- Application security: Web attack signature, bot detection, web vulnerability scanner, OWASP Top-10 Wizard, API protection and more.

Application enhancement
- HTTP and TCP improvement: TCP buffering, HTTP compressions/decompression, HTTP caching (dynamic and static objects), Bandwidth monitoring using quality of service (QoS), TCP buffering, and more.
- Authentication offloading: Two-factor authentication (Fortitoken/Fortitoken Cloud and Google Authentication), NTLM, AUTH2.0, SAML 2.0 (SP and Idp) RADIUS, LDAP, Kerbos, and local.
- Networking: Integration with Ansible, Cisco ACI, OpenStack and Nutanix, NVGRE and VXLAN support, VLAN and port trunking support, IPv6 Support (SLB, firewall, routing and interfaces), Dynamic NAT, Hide NAT, Static NAT for added scalability and flexibility.
- Management: Syslog support, SNMP using private MIBs with threshold-based traps. REST APIs, VDOMS, data analytics, real-time monitoring graphs, role-based monitoring, intuitive reporting, FortiView integration, and more.

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

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

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

Fortinet FortiADC vs. HAProxy