

HAProxy and LoadBalancer Enterprise are two prominent players in the load balancing category, both addressing the needs of large-scale environments. HAProxy stands out due to its flexibility and open-source nature, while LoadBalancer Enterprise has the edge with its dedicated support and seamless integration.
Features: HAProxy is known for its flexibility, reliability, and ease of configuration, offering various load balancing algorithms and features like SSL termination, TCP load balancing, and high availability via VRRP redundancy for seamless operations. LoadBalancer Enterprise provides robust performance, seamless SSL proxy/offloading capabilities, and simplified upgrades, making it ideal for HTTP/HTTPS traffic management and offering integrated support for advanced troubleshooting.
Room for Improvement: HAProxy could improve its graphical user interface and introduce a REST API for dynamic configuration and monitoring. Engaging enhancements in logging and monitoring will also benefit users. LoadBalancer Enterprise could simplify its user interface and restructure its documentation for better accessibility. Addressing specific use case challenges will improve usability for both products.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HAProxy offers deployment flexibility across on-premises and cloud environments, though it primarily relies on community support, resulting in variable technical assistance. LoadBalancer Enterprise is praised for its quick and reliable professional services and responsive technical support, primarily focusing on on-premises and private cloud deployments to ensure a steady customer experience.
Pricing and ROI: HAProxy is a cost-effective open-source solution with no licensing fees, appealing to companies aiming for low operational costs while ensuring high ROI. It becomes a favorable option for those with in-house expertise to manage deployments. LoadBalancer Enterprise, while more expensive, justifies its higher cost through strong features and reliable support, providing value for businesses prioritizing comprehensive service and quick resolution of issues.
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.
This resulted in a drastic decrease in costs and, at the same time, the accuracy of the hits coming on HAProxy was almost around 100% or 99.99%.
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.
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.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
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.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
We have reduced a lot of servers, replacing them with one or two HAProxy servers which deliver better performance, accuracy, and an almost 100% success rate with requests.
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.
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.
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.
As a production engineer at that time, I definitely wanted to ensure that the system could handle massive connections, especially since we operated an e-commerce platform where we could not lose any customer calls.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| HAProxy | 10.4% |
| LoadBalancer Enterprise | 4.3% |
| Other | 85.3% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 9 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 12 |
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
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.
LoadBalancer Enterprise offers a reliable, high-availability solution designed for efficient load distribution and a user-friendly interface, catering to teams with foundational network expertise.
LoadBalancer Enterprise enhances network performance through effective traffic routing, monitoring, and high availability. Users benefit from SSL termination with SNI and Layer 7 load balancing, ensuring seamless connections with reduced complexity compared to alternatives. While known for its user-friendly approach, improvements in configuration simplicity, scalable hardware upgrades, and enhanced notification systems are often discussed for better user experience. Additional demands include HTTP API access, automated configuration backups, DNS load balancing, and enhanced graphing data capabilities. Competitive pricing and heightened security for sensitive data are frequently requested. Interface refresh issues and Microsoft compatibility are noted among users, who deploy it for SSL/HTTP traffic management, redundancy, failover capabilities, web filtering, and cloud migration support.
What are LoadBalancer Enterprise's key features?LoadBalancer Enterprise is implemented across industries for managing SSL/HTTP traffic, enhancing network reliability, and providing failover capabilities. It supports web filtering, balances Exchange and application servers, facilitates cloud migration, and manages multiple ISP lines for optimal traffic distribution across web applications and services, including SIP provisioning. Industries also use it for enhancing security with web application firewalls, DNS sharing, and application publishing.
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