We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Kemp LoadMaster based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Kemp LoadMaster comes out on top in this comparison. It is a comprehensive and powerful solution with excellent customer support.
"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 is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions."
"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."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."
"I like that this is a Network Load Balancer that can be used practically with any application in the backend. They have how-to guides on how to set up Kemp NLB with Exchange, but you can use it as well for Sharepoint, RDS, or any other back end server."
"The configuration is really easy and the web portal is self-explanatory."
"The user interface is very easy to work with."
"There is a simplicity to the setup and configuration."
"Mitigates content security policy issues."
"The most beneficial function of using the ADC is to ensure this resiliency."
"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 most valuable feature so far has been the high-availability options that allowed us to add an additional Kemp LoadMaster VLM virtual appliance into our VMware vSphere environment, to provide failover for our existing LoadMaster."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"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."
"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 do with some good combination integrations."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"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 HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"We have experienced at least one problem with stability, although it was fixed with an upgrade."
"When we go serverless, we may again have to revisit this because the configuration needs to be changed. With this change, we can run into a lot of other configurations that we haven't got into, which involve additional expenses. It would be challenging to convince management to buy at that price point. It would be a balancing act of justifying that expense and the value, that is, how it is going to save a bit of time and make our platform secure. It can have better configuration ability. A lot of iterations happen when we have multiple servers pointing to the same domain. If we do not orchestrate carefully, it gets into a loop, which takes away the precious time of the user who is trying to subscribe to a service. It takes a little longer time to realize services as well as web pages."
"It would be much easier to have the management interface directly integrate with the Kemp Support library, allowing you to choose the desired template from the online catalog to then directly download to the LoadMaster."
"I think there should be more visual instructions on how to configure advanced features."
"It lacks an officially supported, well-written SCOM Management Pack."
"I would like to see more automation and control of overactive and inactive resources. If I could schedule these around our updates then it would be all automated. I would like to set up an automated script to coincide with the scripts I use to update resources and servers."
"The cost of the GEO upgrade is not cost-prohibitive but it's something that would be a nice add-in, out of the box."
"Some documentation is out of date versus the new version, and things have been moved."
HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 41 reviews while Kemp LoadMaster is ranked 6th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 48 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Kemp LoadMaster is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Offers good integration capabilities but needs to improve the monitoring part". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kemp LoadMaster writes "Reliable, easy to set up, and can increase your security score". HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Envoy, whereas Kemp LoadMaster is most compared with NGINX Plus, Citrix NetScaler, Fortinet FortiADC, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and A10 Networks Thunder ADC. See our HAProxy vs. Kemp LoadMaster report.
See our list of best Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) vendors.
We monitor all Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
