We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Istio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Service Mesh solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."
"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."
"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."
"HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime."
"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"The load balancing, service application, and monitoring of the life of the service are valuable features. We use it for authentication of call services, load balancing the calls among the service providers on service instances, and monitoring the health of the services."
"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 needs proper HTTP/2 support."
"Documentation could be improved."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."
"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"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)."
"They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers. Also, they need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."
"For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked."
"Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."
"If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning."
HAProxy is ranked 2nd in Service Mesh with 41 reviews while Istio is ranked 1st in Service Mesh with 6 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Istio is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Istio writes "Provides traffic management and its mutual TLS authentication helps control the access policies". HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler and Loadbalancer.org, whereas Istio is most compared with NGINX Service-Mesh, Kong Mesh, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, AWS App Mesh and Envoy. See our HAProxy vs. Istio report.
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