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HAProxy vs Istio comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.1
HAProxy boosts ROI by reducing costs, enhancing efficiency, increasing uptime, and streamlining SSL tasks, improving client satisfaction.
Sentiment score
4.4
Istio improved connectivity, security, and monitoring, reducing downtime and operational overhead while enhancing reliability, deployment speed, and cost savings.
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.
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.
Using Istio in a banking environment provides excellent value by ensuring secure microservice communication and minimizing performance issues through traceability and other observability features.
At first, I didn't see significant savings, but in the end, I realized that I didn't need as many tools since Istio already contains many aspects and features, which saved me a lot of time and probably money.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.5
HAProxy's support is expert and quick but may face delays; some users prefer more comprehensive documentation and resources.
Sentiment score
3.5
Istio's support is community-driven with extensive resources, independent issue management, and optional paid support; engineer expertise is praised.
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.
Responses are often received within 24 hours, which is fair given the free nature of the service.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
HAProxy is highly scalable, efficiently handles varying traffic loads, and suits small to medium-sized businesses despite some limitations.
Sentiment score
7.5
Istio excels in scalability with autoscaling and load balancing, rated highly by users, though large environments may require improvement.
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.
Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance.
I use AWS EKS with a cluster autoscaler, enabling automatic scaling based on load.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
HAProxy is highly reliable, with users experiencing stability and swift resolution of issues, leading to high satisfaction ratings.
Sentiment score
6.1
Istio is reliable and stable for moderate traffic, earning high ratings despite occasional bugs and configuration challenges.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The architecture, configuration, and resource management can impact stability.
I rate the stability of Istio as an eight or nine out of ten.
Istio has been stable in my experience.
 

Room For Improvement

HAProxy users seek improved APIs, scaling, security, GUI, logging, cloud integration, pricing, and beginner-friendly documentation for broader adoption.
Istio's complexity, scalability, and support challenges hinder usability, especially with new developments like Ambient Mesh and proxyless changes.
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.
It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise support, to quickly resolve issues that might affect production.
Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
 

Setup Cost

HAProxy provides a cost-effective, flexible solution for enterprises with affordable licensing and optional paid support for ease of deployment.
Istio attracts enterprises with its open-source model, reducing costs by focusing expenses on necessary infrastructure and integrations.
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.
Integration with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch incurs additional costs.
 

Valuable Features

HAProxy is valued for its load balancing, flexibility, performance, scalability, open-source cost savings, and seamless infrastructure integration.
Istio offers load balancing, security, and monitoring features ideal for enterprise projects with easy integration and comprehensive documentation.
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.
The best features HAProxy offers for my setup are easy configuration, as I don't need to set up many things; I just installed it and write configurations based on my needs.
Istio provides excellent documentation and support, allowing for easy troubleshooting.
The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable.
 

Categories and Ranking

HAProxy
Ranking in Service Mesh
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th), Bot Management (9th)
Istio
Ranking in Service Mesh
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 14.5%, up from 13.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Istio is 18.1%, down from 22.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Service Mesh Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Istio18.1%
HAProxy14.5%
Other67.4%
Service Mesh
 

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks
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 reliability features of HAProxy were particularly useful in a scenario where I needed to test load balancing between two Tomcats. Since these domains were inaccessible, I set up a third Docker with HAProxy, which had access to the Tomcat domains. I then configured HAProxy to handle the load balancing. This setup allowed the client to interact with HAProxy. The solution's integration with other elements is easy.
Redentor Del Rosario - PeerSpot reviewer
Leverage cloud security monitoring across multiple providers with robust integration
The best features Istio offers in my experience stand out because my job requires me to look for and use this type of tool, and this fits what I'm looking for, not just because it's free, not just because of the monitoring side, but simply because a lot of what pertains to my project is useful for Istio. One of the good things about the features is that due to the nature of the tool, it is really good for enterprise projects, and it can be helpful for every company. Istio has positively impacted my organization by helping our architecture design and development, and we use this as a mesh, applying it for every single application and using those components, which is helping our company and our clients to do many different aspects for all the use of Istio.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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?
Our experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been quite straightforward. Since we use the open-source edition, there are no licensing fees, with the main cost being the infrastructur...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Istio?
Istio provides a significant saving for us in terms of costs since it is open source. However, Istio can still come at a price. It has a steep learning curve and might require more manpower hours ...
What do you like most about Istio?
We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.
What needs improvement with Istio?
The positive changes include improvements in efficiency, and while I think the free aspect is good, it's crucial to be aware that sometimes cost will give you a good way for your needs, meaning it ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about HAProxy vs. Istio and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
873,585 professionals have used our research since 2012.