We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiADC, 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 user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily."
"The product has flexible and interesting licensing options."
"From a technical perspective, it is the most scalable device from Fortinet."
"Because ADC is the intermediary between the servers and the end-user application, it gives thorough information about the traffic, what the problem is."
"I am impressed with the product's load-balancing feature."
"Fortinet FortiADC is a good product because each and every piece of content is monitored by it."
"It's a good product because it supports all the features that ADC solutions in the market can support, like F5 solutions, for example, such as the LTM of F5."
"The main feature that we use is GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing). GSLB makes the customer's network more reliable by scaling applications across multiple datacenters. GSLB as a disaster recovery solution can direct traffic based on site availability."
"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"
"It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors."
"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."
"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 valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"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."
"The load balancers have an easy installation and a relatively simple, easy user interface to use."
"Existing customers are trying to migrate from the physical F5 load balancer to the AVI load balancer because it is scalable and easily managed."
"The SSL Layer 7 load balancing is valuable."
"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."
"Most important for us that it makes sure that the load is distributed and that we always have access to the end servers."
"Load balancing helps us distribute both incoming and outgoing data loads evenly among the servers, preventing overload on a single server."
"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."
"The connection that this solution helps our servers maintain has been most useful."
"I think it would be helpful if Fortinet put more video examples on their cookbook site."
"Technical support and documentation could both be improved."
"The product’s price could be reduced. Also, some of its features need to be more advanced."
"Fortinet FortiADC should include an advanced-level SD-WAN."
"The user interface could be more friendly and CLI could be more like that of Fortigate."
"The configuration is relatively complex."
"It would be good if they built in a fully functional web application firewall."
"Issues with SSL and encrypted traffic."
"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 visibility could be improved."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is."
"The web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible)."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"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."
"It would be great if there was a way to gain access to the graphing data, to create custom reports. If we had a way to use the graphing data, we could use it to present certain information to our client, such as the uptime status for their service."
"I'd like to see scalability improved; it can be costly."
"It doesn't have the bonding capability feature."
"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."
"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."
"I would like a notification when a new version of the software is available. They told me to sign up for their newsletter, but I have not received any notification for a newer software version."
"Loadbalancer.org's complexity could be reduced."
"Possibly a more graphical overview page (with colors) to give a two second overview to see if everything is working fine."