HAProxy vs Kemp LoadMaster vs Loadbalancer.org comparison

HAProxy and Progress Software are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. HAProxy is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.6, while Progress Software is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.0. HAProxy holds a 12.4% mindshare in ADC, compared to Progress Software’s 7.5% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of HAProxy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

HAProxy

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

6,550 Views
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

Loadbalancer.org

Read 23 Loadbalancer.org reviews

1,185 Views
1,165 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

HAProxy

Kemp LoadMaster

Loadbalancer.org

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HAProxy, Kemp LoadMaster, and Loadbalancer.org 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).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

May 2025

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Helped 851,451 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 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. The mindshare of Loadbalancer.org is 3.7%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

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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Roger Seelaender

UCaaS Engineering Manager at EarthLink

Great WAF - low-maintenance solution that performs as advertised

The solution can be improved with the development of a SIP engine because it is difficult to manage SBCs. All SBCs are really tough to write rules for. If we could put this in front of an SBC to have the right rules to possibly block the traffic, that would be very helpful. The solution can also improve the relationship between Loadbalancer.org and Metaswitch, or now, Microsoft because Metaswitch was purchased by Microsoft. They both position themselves as certified but don't always talk to each other. I wish there would be closer integration between the solution and the vendors when either release new upgrades to their product line. Often we find issues on either end post upgrades.

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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

"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."

"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."

"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."

"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."

"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."

"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."

"The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."

"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."

More HAProxy pros

"The feature I find most valuable is load balancing with different algorithms."

"The most beneficial function of using the ADC is to ensure this resiliency."

"LoadMaster is easy to deploy and understand."

"The most valuable feature that I found is the load balancing feature, it is the core function of the product."

"Persistence is very valuable. This holds the connection information of the source and that connection is important to RDP and our APO calls. The connection has to be persisted to the original source to operate properly. We also use the subsections for sub-services to create services inside our services for our API resources, this is most awesome. We would not be able to do this without Kemp and offer this type of sub-service to route based on an API instance. It routes the traffic properly based on the sub-service type."

"The most valuable features for us are the Load Balancing and Web Application Firewall, as we have a lot of web applications."

"It has greatly fortified the performance and uptime of our front-door email ingress, simplified and segmented mail routing, and reduced admin overhead for mail issue resolution and troubleshooting."

"We needed a Microsoft Threat Management Gateway server replacement solution for a customer and were impressed with the simplified deployment of the Kemp LoadMasters."

More Kemp LoadMaster pros

"I found scalability in Loadbalancer.org valuable."

"The performance is good."

"With basic network knowledge, our required system functionality can be configured and maintained."

"The most valuable features of Loadbalancer.org are related to its load balancing capabilities."

"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."

"Loadbalancer.org is less complex than Citrix."

"The features I find valuable in this solution are the ease of managing the logs on the WAFs, the ease to identify break-in attempts into the network, the front-end firewall, and a more specific firewall."

More Loadbalancer.org pros

Cons

"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)."

"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."

"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."

"The product does not have any new technologies."

"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."

"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."

"The visibility could be improved."

More HAProxy cons

"It would be very helpful to get all the http/https session logs by default in the log monitor without activating debugging mode like an apache web sever natively does"

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

"So far, the only hitch we have run into is that would have been nice to have an easier method to add allow/whitelist entries into the Access Control lists for virtual services."

"Some documentation is out of date versus the new version, and things have been moved."

"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."

"We have experienced at least one problem with stability, although it was fixed with an upgrade."

"The GUI is rather technical and complex, so it could be improved by making it simpler and more user-friendly."

"They were still in the process of development, and for example, we set it up in a cluster. So it was one logistical unit built out of two physical devices. And the expected behavior, which I know from other devices, will be formed into a logic cluster. It's that you configure one unit. Then you bring the second unit into this cluster with the already configured primary unit. So the secondary box pulls all the configured ones from its neighbor, does everything automatically, and then synchronizes with this primary neighbor. And then it works, like, one logical unit. And this didn't work with the Kemp's initially, where they caused a lot of issues when building up a cluster, so there were some specials on how to set this up. When we built or set them up for the first time and the months afterward with no new software releases, there were a couple of problems, but in the end, they worked fine. So, they developed a lot and learned from what they've responded to, what we responded to them, and what needs fixing."

More Kemp LoadMaster cons

"An area for improvement in Loadbalancer.org is that sometimes it works fine, but sometimes, it has issues. The setup for Loadbalancer.org is also complex, so that's another area for improvement."

"I would like it if Loadbalancer had the ability to make rules for specific shared bots."

"We could enhance the security aspects of the load balancer."

"It doesn't have the bonding capability feature."

"I'd like to see scalability improved; it can be costly."

"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."

"There are many features you can set in the backend of Loadbalancer. They should simplify the configuration. The administrator should be able to configure it more simply. How it is now, you can only configure it if you have a lot of experience."

"There is room for improvement in Loadbalancer.org in certain areas."

More Loadbalancer.org cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."

"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."

"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."

"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."

"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."

"The product is open source."

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

"It is free of cost."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"This product has good value and features for the money."

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

"KEMP gives away free trials for 30 days. This can be stretched if you want. During the test, you will have access to KEMP support."

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

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

"The pricing is alright and we pay a monthly licensing fee"

"It has a great price for the solution they offer."

"I have control on the licensing and all the prices since I work for a partner."

More Kemp LoadMaster pricing and cost advice

"They're not the cheapest, not the most expensive, but I think value-wise, they're 100%."

"It filled a requirement for our project, and it did so at lesser cost than their competitors."

"It is inexpensive, and even their “unlimited” version, the VA MAX is still far cheaper than competitors."

"I’m not entirely sure about the rating since I'm not very technical. I haven't thoroughly compared the ratings. So, if you're asking for my impression so far, I would rate it around five out of 10."

"The costs associated with Loadbalancer.org depends on the technology. For some, we need to pay, but others are open, so they're free."

"It's worth the cost. It's not cheap, but it's a good solution. If you're looking for a good solution, this is a good solution. Is it cheap? No. Is it worth the money? Yes, I think it is."

"For now, it's stable."

"It was easy to upgrade the license for unlimited clusters and servers. Pricing is fair."

More Loadbalancer.org pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

57%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Government

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

See all answers

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 ...

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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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Do you recommend Loadbalancer.org?

Since Loadbalancer.org is an open-source solution, I would recommend this solution for smaller businesses that don’t ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Loadbalancer.org?

Existing customers are trying to migrate from the physical F5 load balancer to the AVI load balancer because it is sc...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Loadbalancer.org?

Pricing of Loadbalancer.org is something to consider.

See all answers

Comparisons

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

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs HAProxy

Compared 4% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Fortinet FortiADC vs Kemp LoadMaster

Compared 16% of the time

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

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs Kemp LoadMaster

Compared 5% of the time

More Kemp LoadMaster Competitors

NetScaler vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 24% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 16% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 14% of the time

Radware Alteon vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 6% of the time

NGINX Plus vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 4% of the time

More Loadbalancer.org Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

May 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

Kemp LoadMaster

May 2025

Download Kemp LoadMaster product report

Buyer's Guide

Loadbalancer.org

May 2025

Download Loadbalancer.org product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

LoadMaster Load Balancer

No data available

Overview

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.

HAProxy

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

Loadbalancer.org is a versatile solution that offers load balancing for small businesses, multiple instances of applications, web application firewall, publishing Windows and SQL applications, and security for telephone service systems. It is easy to use, cost-effective, and performs well with low latency.

The connection maintenance and security features are valuable, including managing logs on WAFs, identifying break-in attempts writing rules to block them and using HAProxy to control what is allowed. Loadbalancer.org has helped organizations reduce the impact of connection issues, provide security, and ensure no downtime or impact on productivity.

Top Industries that use Loadbalancer.org:

Healthcare: Loadbalancer.org is widely considered the top load balancer provider in the healthcare IT industry. Loadbalancer.org sees that healthcare IT personnel can ensure their organizations are moving seamlessly toward interoperability and are able to easily scale to meet today’s continually growing data demands with no compromise in performance.

Storage solutions: Loadbalancer.org has significant offerings and partnerships with object-based storage providers to ensure they are always ready for today's ever-changing dynamic storage needs. The comprehensive integration offers high-performance scalable solutions which can provide always available next-gen storage solutions.

Security: Loadbalancer.org solutions provide an extra layer of security to protect against the latest risk and threats. Loadbalancer.org will provide a close integration to ensure the organization is always secure.

Print: Loadbalancer.org can work with organizations to ensure their print environments keep working smoothly and is the only organization that fully supports Microsoft Print load balancing. Loadbalancer.org minimizes the complexities of print environments to ensure that all systems are consistently available.

Loadbalancer.org is certified as an OEM provider for all of Microsoft's most popular key applications and solutions. Loadbalancer.org has created and developed streamlined deployments to facilitate improved scalability, performance, and uptime. They offer a tailored GUI to make every process super easy. Loadbalancer.org offers several flexible licensing plans to ensure cost-effectiveness, improved margins, revenue opportunities, and optimized TCO. The numerous robust solutions Loadbalancer.org offers can ensure that any enterprise organization is able to satisfy the growing demands of today’s dynamic marketplace while maintaining an excellent user experience.

Reviews from Real Users

“Loadbalancer.org is less complex than Citrix. In some cases, our customers do not have an engineer on staff who can support this device. These customers have a large number of Linux engineers but don't have the money. We suggested using Loadbalancer.org and other open-source tools. Many customers are of different sizes and have different budgets. Loadbalancer.org has everything that is needed.” - Artem M., System Engineer at CROC

“We use Loadbalancer for balancing loads in our main application. Loadbalancer is easy to use. It performs well, with low latency.” - Walid M., Network and Security Engineer at a logistics company

Loadbalancer.org

Sample Customers

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

Vodafone, NASA, Mercedes, NBC, Siemens, AT&T, Barclays, Zurich, Penn State University, Fiserv, Canon, Toyota, University of Cambridge, US Army, US Navy, Ocean Spray, ASOS, Pfizer, BBC, Bacardi, Monsoon, River Island, U.S Air Force, King's College London, NHS, Ricoh, Philips, Santander, TATA Communications, Ericcson, Ross Video, Evertz, TalkTalk TV, Giacom, Rapid Host.

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

May 2025

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