Fortinet FortiADC vs HAProxy vs Kemp LoadMaster comparison

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

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4,229 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Kemp LoadMaster

Read 49 Kemp LoadMaster reviews

3,893 Views
2,409 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Fortinet FortiADC

Kemp LoadMaster

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

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

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

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

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

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Helped 851,042 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 May 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiADC is 10.3%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 12.4%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kemp LoadMaster is 7.5%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Saeid Khanipour Ghobani

IT Manager at Technology Evaluation Center

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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Bhaskar Rao

Network manager admin at Yamaha

Open-source, simple to install, and reliable

Although HAProxy is essentially open-source, many features are not available. While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source. We are only experiencing problems at that time. Otherwise, everything is fine. Because we need to search for a document or some troubleshooting information. That could be beneficial to us. To resolve the troubleshooting issues, additional documentation and troubleshooting are required. The product is satisfactory. However, additional documentation, additional technical documents, and troubleshooting steps are the types of things that can only make this solution better. Also, more clarity on where the package is hitting and where it is stopping is needed.

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PeterForster

Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

A highly stable and scalable load-balancing software that offers great technical support

My company is really happy with Kemp LoadMaster as a product. My company is also happy with the support we receive from Kemp LoadMaster. I want Kemp LoadMaster to provide users with better reporting capabilities in relation to TCP packets. In general, the connections that are present in the system require improvement. Feature-wise, Kemp LoadMaster has everything that our company's customers require. Kemp LoadMaster also has features that have supported our company's past projects.

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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

"Fortinet FortiADC is a good product because each and every piece of content is monitored by it."

"I like the solution's load balance with DNS intelligence."

"Simple to use and easy to integrate."

"The most valuable feature is its simplicity."

"This ensures that clients can connect to their applications without interruption."

"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."

"TSL and SSL offloading are both very good features."

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

More Fortinet FortiADC pros

"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."

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

"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."

"The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something."

"The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB-algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none."

"It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors."

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

"I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime."

More HAProxy pros

"The user interface is very easy to work with."

"The pricing of the solution is valuable."

"With Kemp 360 Central, our customers get a nice overview of their Kemp products and an easy way to upgrade firmware on all devices from a single interface."

"The DNS Load Balancer makes it so that I don't have to worry about site failures."

"The solution is easy to configure when changing the load balancing method to Round Robin or least connection."

"The Global WAF has saved us more than one time from unwanted traffic."

"When the templates are used, there is not much left to configure and they just work!"

"The old process of manually having to redirect Outlook Web Access traffic and Email traffic to a second server is a thing of the past."

More Kemp LoadMaster pros

Cons

"The product's stability for VMs could be better."

"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."

"Technical support and documentation could both be improved."

"Issues with SSL and encrypted traffic."

"I had a terrible experience with Fortinet support. I only used support once when I bought the solution. I got no response for two days. However, I believe that it's no longer the case. Fortinet solutions have problems when they're launched. For example, we had issues with Fortinet's authenticator when it came out. We also had trouble with FortiNAC in the beginning."

"Fortinet FortiADC should include an advanced-level SD-WAN."

"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."

"FortiADC is complex to configure so the interface should be improved."

More Fortinet FortiADC cons

"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."

"The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved."

"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."

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

"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."

"HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets."

"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"

More HAProxy cons

"I definitely think that the WAF can be improved."

"They need to improve the UI environment. Currently, it's hard to navigate and use product."

"The auth website of ESP is really lacking. It’s not responsive (mobile friendly) and the procedure of changing the website is difficult. We tend to avoid using pre-auth for that reason."

"It has all types of logs and they are very detailed, but it's a little bit hard to search for a single event."

"In the web interface, there are a lot of settings in the different menus and it would be helpful if there were an interactive help system or tooltips to help the administrators find and configure the right settings."

"I really don't like the way the logs are presented in the software."

"Although Kemp is very user-friendly, it lacks a more custom configuration."

"The configuration of the basic services is pretty straight forward but for more complex solutions, there needs to be better documentation or knowledge base articles."

More Kemp LoadMaster cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better."

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

"They offer a perpetual license."

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

"The price is competitive"

"The product has affordable pricing."

More Fortinet FortiADC pricing and cost advice

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."

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

"It is free of cost."

"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."

"The product is open source."

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

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"Less expensive than Citrix."

"The product definitely provides what the organization needs and its cost is reasonable considering the value it brings."

"Nowadays, going with the virtual appliance is the easiest way and the cost is reasonable."

"Licensing is yearly and I am going to guess that it is CAN $2000.00."

"The price is great and the value is definitely there."

"The price of the solution is cheap."

"From a cost perspective, Kemp is very competitive and is not hard to justify by any means."

"They have multiple tiers of licensing and you can upgrade it easily."

More Kemp LoadMaster 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.

See recommendations

851,042 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Retailer

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

56%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

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 hav...

Do you recommend Fortinet FortiADC?

I recommend Fortinet FortiADC. My experience with Fortinet has been very positive. Our company has been using it for ...

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...

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?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

What do you like most about Kemp LoadMaster?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten...The initial ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kemp LoadMaster?

LoadMaster is cheaper than some other solutions. It has a perpetual license, so it's a one-time cost.

What needs improvement with Kemp LoadMaster?

There are some challenges with updates on certain models that don't have a few features. The support team often takes...

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

Comparisons

Compared 27% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 25% of the time

NetScaler vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 12% of the time

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 5% of the time

NGINX Plus vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 3% of the time

More Fortinet FortiADC Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 14% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Radware Alteon vs HAProxy

Compared 3% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

NGINX Plus vs Kemp LoadMaster

Compared 15% of the time

NetScaler vs Kemp LoadMaster

Compared 11% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Kemp LoadMaster

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Kemp LoadMaster

Compared 7% of the time

Loadbalancer.org vs Kemp LoadMaster

Compared 6% of the time

More Kemp LoadMaster Competitors

Product Reports

Download Fortinet FortiADC product report

Fortinet FortiADC

April 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Kemp LoadMaster

Download Kemp LoadMaster product report

Also Known As

FortiADC Application Delivery Controller, FortiADC

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

LoadMaster Load Balancer

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.

Fortinet

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.

Kemp LoadMaster is a powerful load balancing solution that also serves as a web application firewall. Its primary use case is load balancing and application load balancing, making it an ideal solution for organizations that must distribute traffic across multiple servers. Kemp's integration with an active directory for ESP usage, hosting/deployment of SSL certificates, and pricing are some of its most valuable features.

Using Kemp has helped organizations mitigate cross-scripting vulnerabilities, cookie-related issues, and content security policy issues. It has also allowed them to handle everything with Kemp instead of working on each application individually.

Progress Software

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

Kent County Council, KEMP, SMA Solar Technology AG, RT Player , Victrix (Quebec, Canada), Texas A&M, Macmillan Cancer Support, Cisco, Austin Bank

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)