HAProxy vs Kemp LoadMaster vs Radware Alteon 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

Radware Alteon

Read 48 Radware Alteon reviews

2,162 Views
1,428 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

HAProxy

Kemp LoadMaster

Radware Alteon

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HAProxy, Kemp LoadMaster, and Radware Alteon 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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

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Helped 850,349 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 Radware Alteon is 4.9%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

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.

Read full review

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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MaverickHurley

Sr network arch at Mohawk Industries

Makes it easier and quicker to spin up services when we deploy applications

The most valuable aspect is the ability to customize the types of load-balancing scenarios needed for customized applications. Some of the load balancers on the market today are strictly out-of-hand load balancers for SSL or HTTP. Radware Alteon is most useful for customizing in-house applications based on ports and protocols. Another great feature is integrated application protection. There are many features you can activate. Some of them are add-ons, such as WAF protection, DDoS, rate-limiting, and connections-per-second per application. We also use Radware where we do all the programming.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."

"The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."

"The solution is user-friendly and efficient."

"Stability is number one."

"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."

"Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind."

"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."

"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."

More HAProxy pros

"The DNS Load Balancer makes it so that I don't have to worry about site failures."

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

"The most valuable feature is the load balancing and allowing for high availability of our web services."

"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."

"Load-balancing is a great feature that is very easy to configure and it is always working fine."

"I like the way this solution handles multiple SSLs in different domains while still load balancing."

"The security features are the most valuable features of this solution."

"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."

More Kemp LoadMaster pros

"The link load balancing is a great feature."

"The most valuable feature of Radware LinkProof for traffic distribution is its DNS management capability."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its stability. During the time that I have been using it, it has not undergone a service failure... And with the integrated application protection, we have not suffered from attacks anymore."

"Radware has been characterized by being extremely robust. This gives us the confidence to offer our users a continuous service."

"The device blocks threats and allows legitimate users to work correctly."

"I like how easy it is to create policies in Alteon. Debugging and SSL offloading are also simple, and the global load-balancing part is good. Load-balancing and SSL offloading are the two features that ensure your virtual services work perfectly."

"The most valuable feature is the support from the engineering team."

"Overall, I would rate Alteon a nine out of ten."

More Radware Alteon pros

Cons

"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"

"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."

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

"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."

"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 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)."

"Documentation could be improved."

"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."

More HAProxy cons

"The configuration of the basic services is pretty straight forward but for more complex solutions, there needs to be better documentation or knowledge base articles."

"In my opinion, the layer seven loads balancing that we're mainly using for web servers, doesn't seem to pick up when there are issues at the application level."

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

"In the next release, they can introduce 360 views in the same dashboard to make it easier for users to view. The graphical information should be displayed on the dashboard."

"The product is really good as-is out of the box. If there is one thing I would change is to have the license file not be coupled with the MAC address of the device. This is actually not really useful in a virtual environment where if you have a single VM with KEMP LoadMaster and you have not set up static MAC Address, if you, for example, recreate the VM and just load the disk file on a new VM it will get new MAC address and the NLB will not work as it will not see a proper license."

"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."

"The ability to see live traffic is not great and can be improved."

"Over the last several major versions, the GUI has remained virtually unchanged and still seems lacking."

More Kemp LoadMaster cons

"A feature that I would like to see included in the next version might be a better analysis when working with crypt issues. Right now, it is very manual; you load it into Alteon and it runs. It would be interesting to see a more dynamic process."

"You need to have pretty good internal knowledge of the solution."

"The service could be improved by better customer support."

"The resolution time could be faster."

"Multiple software bugs exist. Most of the time, they're issues with Radware's patching. The organization has a vulnerability and penetration team attempting to upgrade the system to version n minus one. If we have deployed the software to the n-minus-one range, the device isn't performing well because it's already in the testing version."

"Load balancing needs improvement. It needs better integration. I heard f5 works as a DNS operator which is not available in this solution. It would be better if that was implemented."

"The solution could be more robust."

"Support is an area that needs improvement."

More Radware Alteon cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."

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

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

"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."

"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."

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

"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"They have multiple tiers of licensing and you can upgrade it easily."

"It is well-priced and licensing is very flexible."

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

"Less expensive than Citrix."

"The Kemp LoadMaster is a tremendous value."

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

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

"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."

More Kemp LoadMaster pricing and cost advice

"It is cost-efficient. That is why we have gone with Alteon. As a product, it is efficient and robust. We have not faced any issues with the device."

"Radware LinkProof is neither cheap nor expensive."

"I'm content with Alteon's pricing."

"It is not the priciest and it is not the cheapest. For our solution, it was right in the middle of price performance."

"We have three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain more discounts. It seems to be a much cheaper alternative."

"Alteon's price is excellent compared to other solutions. F5 costs around twice as much. We still have about three years left before this hardware reaches the end of its life. We're migrating to the cloud, and phasing some of this out, but it's nice that they've given us a long window to keep their hardware in place."

"Its pricing is very good. It is very competitive. Radware Alteon is the leader in the market. At a lesser price, we get a good product and also good support. Other vendors who are providing load balancers charge separately for two items. You have the hardware cost, and you have the support cost, whereas, in the case of Radware, you get both in a single package."

"Our government agency opted for Radware Alteon due to its affordability and efficiency. While I can't say precisely how much it costs the organization, the price per device. In India, we always look for affordable products, so I assume Alteon is cost-effective because the government chose it."

More Radware Alteon 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

56%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

University

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

11%

Retailer

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

What do you like most about Radware Alteon?

It saves us a lot of work in terms of management since it has tasks already defined automatically. That enables us to...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Alteon?

We have a three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain mo...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Radware Alteon?

It is a fairly complete service and it is difficult for me to think of what can be improved. A feature that I would l...

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

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs HAProxy

Compared 3% 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

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs Kemp LoadMaster

Compared 1% of the time

More Kemp LoadMaster Competitors

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Radware Alteon

Compared 18% of the time

NetScaler vs Radware Alteon

Compared 14% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Radware Alteon

Compared 12% of the time

NGINX Plus vs Radware Alteon

Compared 7% of the time

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs Radware Alteon

Compared 7% of the time

More Radware Alteon Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

April 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

Kemp LoadMaster

April 2025

Download Kemp LoadMaster product report

Buyer's Guide

Radware Alteon

April 2025

Download Radware Alteon product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

LoadMaster Load Balancer

Alteon, Radware AppWall

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

Radware Alteon is an application delivery controller (ADC) solution that provides global load balancing for all web, cloud and mobile-based applications. The solution is designed to help your organization simplify operations while ensuring resilience and SLA. It manages application traffic across both data and cloud center locations, optimizing availability and performance. In addition, Radware Alteon integrates multiple application protection services to provide protection against an array of cyberthreats.

Radware Alteon Features

Radware Alteon has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Robust
Load-balancing reverse proxy
Stable
Flexible
Guaranteed application availability
Application aware traffic redirection capabilities
Faster web application response time
Application specific optimized configuration guides
Configuration templates
Built-in virtualization
Built-in application and network security

Radware Alteon Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Radware Alteon. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Flexible deployment options: Radware Alteon is deployable in a multitude of form factors, including on-premises, virtual, and cloud, and provides a consistent application delivery and security service in any application environment.

Automation scripts library: To support faster time to service for complex application delivery and security services, Alteon is supported by an extensive range of automation scripts library. This also enables seamless integration of Radware Alteon services into the DevOps CI/CD processes.

Integrated application protection: The solution offers comprehensive application protection via embedded WAF, bot management, threat intelligence, and API protection capabilities. This ensures application availability and helps to minimize false positives, as well as keep applications along with their data secure.

Actionable visibility: With Radware Alteon you can stay ahead of issues and threats. The solution provides real-time visibility and actionable insights for proactive management of application availability and security issues before the user experience is impacted.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the solution.

PeerSpot reviewer Jefe de implementaciones de Datos at RETO Industrial S.A. de. C.V., mentions, “The simple and well-documented configuration allows us to be able to implement new balancing services at the request of the user with the same conditions and good service that they expect. We can also make changes to services that are already running, as I mentioned before, the graphical interface is very intuitive and you can almost always make the most common changes quickly. Radware has been characterized by being extremely robust. This gives us the confidence to offer our users a continuous service.”

A director of consulting says, “The most valuable features are the load-balancing and reverse proxy. Global-load balancing as well is valuable. I also find it to be stable. To date, we have not had any issues with it.”

An SOC Specialist at a tech services company explains, “The interface is easy, it's friendly, and has good alerting. When you have a problem with a server, it will alert you. It is useful in many areas, especially for web applications and load balancing. It's something that the customer can see on the internet.”

Radware

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

Convergys

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

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