HAProxy vs NGINX Plus vs NetScaler comparison

HAProxy and NetScaler are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. HAProxy is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.6, while NetScaler is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. HAProxy holds a 12.3% mindshare in ADC, compared to NetScaler’s 14.6% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of HAProxy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of NetScaler users who would recommend it.

HAProxy

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

5,812 Views
3,746 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

NetScaler

Read 107 NetScaler reviews

6,425 Views
4,740 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

NGINX Plus

Read 31 NGINX Plus reviews

2,818 Views
2,383 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

HAProxy

NetScaler

NGINX Plus

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HAProxy, NetScaler, and NGINX Plus based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetScaler, F5, Microsoft and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

June 2025

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Helped 860,711 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 July 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 12.3%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetScaler is 14.6%, down from 16.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 7.4%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Kaushlendra Singh

Manager - IT Infrastructure and Network at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Used for load balancing, but its dashboard and reporting could be improved

We use the solution for load balancing The solution's implementation and troubleshooting are not easy. The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved. I have been using HAProxy for 12 years. We didn’t face any issues with the solution’s stability. I rate the solution’s stability an…

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DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU

Cloud Consultant at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking

Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

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Michael Olayemi

Senior Software Engineer at Checkit

Enables public access and secure configurations through reverse proxy

The primary valuable feature of NGINX for me is its ability to provide a reverse proxy. I have found that this feature supports our local server, and I am able to connect through our DNS system, making it accessible publicly. Additionally, the integration with SSL certificates and the configuration capabilities make it a valuable solution for my use case. Without NGINX, users would not be able to access our application, which means there is positive ROI from using NGINX as it is crucial for the functioning of my organization.

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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

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

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

"It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors."

"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."

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

"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"

"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."

"The solution is user-friendly and efficient."

More HAProxy pros

"I find all of it to be valuable, because of the flexibility that is built into this product."

"It is simple for both IT specialists and customers."

"We appreciate that this solution facilitates our access to Citrix internet."

"The solution is easy to work with and manage."

"I like the monitoring ability as it enables me to identify when an internal (load-balanced) resource is having issues before it becomes a problem in production."

"The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic enters our environment."

"Available on any device and can be accessed on a wide area network."

"The best feature of Citrix is its track record of stability in its features."

More NetScaler pros

"When I worked in a security research center, we tested NGINX to support DoS and DDoS attacks, and its results were great."

"This solution has everything."

"Its versatility and capabilities make it invaluable for implementing patches and fixes when necessary."

"The product is resilient."

"The best solution, by far, for web traffic control for things in production and just around the house."

"NGINX Plus' most valuable feature is the ingress controller."

"When you use NGINX, you have more options and power."

"I find the solution’s community support and documentation most valuable. Compared to HAProxy, have found a lot of documentation and community support on Quora. If you would be asking me as a developer whether to choose this product, I would recommend this since it has good community support, documentation, and signature updates. The configuration of HAProxy is also very tedious. However, NGINX’s configuration is very simple."

More NGINX Plus pros

Cons

"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."

"There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment."

"The solution can be improved by controlling TCP behavior better and mandating to clients what the expected outcome must be in order to avoid receiving contestant timeout logs."

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

"The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved."

"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."

"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."

More HAProxy cons

"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."

"The WAF component needs to be simplified so that it is easier to use."

"The licensing model and technical support of the solution could be improved."

"The setup for Citrix NetScaler has room for improvement. It could be easier."

"The solution is a bit more expensive than some of the available solutions in this region. One solution in particular that I noticed was cheaper was Kemp."

"Citrix ADC can improve if it provides a more user-friendly interface and clear working protocols. Citrix is not working with classic RFC, it is working with Citrix RFC, which is not common in the world. If engineers of Citrix can provide us with more information on working with the classic IP networks it would be a benefit."

"Overall the price of Citrix ADC could be more competitive."

"They can improve the scalability and the multi-tenancy feature. We recently tried to configure an authentication, and we ran into some issues while using the web-based GUI. It was very slow when you log in with your credentials in the web-based GUI. Each time we clicked on the menu, it tried to do the authentication. It works properly in the console."

More NetScaler cons

"Only improvement needed that I would point to is scalability. With it, I mean clusterized organisation on a low level. At the moment, the best alternative is RHEL HA."

"It would be great if there was even more automation to make it even easier to maintain."

"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."

"The center management system could be improved."

"Our most challenging part was to run an older PHP website reverse-proxied through NGINX. That was not fun."

"NGINX Plus is moderately priced, but it could give better value for money."

"It would be good if NGINX provided a graphical user interface."

"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."

More NGINX Plus cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

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

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

"The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."

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

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

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

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

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"I rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The solution's pricing is very high compared to its competitors."

"We have been evaluating F5, Citrix, and other ADC products. Citrix is the most expense of all of them."

"I give the price of the solution a seven out of ten."

"The pricing could be lower."

"We get value for money. Its price is fair. I don't think it is overpriced."

"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

"We are quite happy with price. It's not too high."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

"You pay for each feature that you want."

"Compared to other similar solutions on the market, I think it's over-priced."

"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours."

"There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free."

"The solution is free, but you can spend a lot of money with a complex solution."

"The cost is reasonable."

"Nginx is free. I don't have experience with the Plus version."

"It's an open source solution, so it's free."

More NGINX Plus pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

17%

Government

Comms Service Provider

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 Citrix ADC?

The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic ente...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADC?

After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexi...

See all answers

Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?

IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architectur...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX Plus?

It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?

My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 14% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs HAProxy

Compared 6% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 10% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler

Compared 9% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs NetScaler

Compared 8% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

Radware Alteon vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

More NetScaler Competitors

IIS vs NGINX Plus

Compared 16% of the time

Apache Web Server vs NGINX Plus

Compared 12% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs NGINX Plus

Compared 11% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs NGINX Plus

Compared 9% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NGINX Plus

Compared 5% of the time

More NGINX Plus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

June 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

June 2025

Download NetScaler product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX Plus

June 2025

Download NGINX Plus product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall

NGINX

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

One platform for a consistent application delivery and security experience because nobody has time to learn multiple systems to manage ADC deployments. NetScaler is built with a single code base using a software-based architecture, so no matter which ADC form factor you choose — hardware, virtual machine, bare metal, or container — the behavior will be the same.

NetScaler

NGINX Plus is a versatile solution that offers load balancing, caching, proxying, and API deployment capabilities. It can be deployed on private or public clouds and is ideal for building CDN solutions. The solution can also be used to secure web applications and replace web services like Apache.

NGINX has helped organizations improve functioning, reduce downtimes, and offer a DevOps-friendly solution. Its community support and documentation are highly regarded, and its configuration is more straightforward, making it a recommended choice over HAProxy.

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp

ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk

Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

June 2025

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