

NGINX Plus and HAProxy compete in the load balancing and application delivery category. NGINX Plus appears to have a slight edge due to its enhanced modularity and community engagement.
Features: NGINX Plus stands out with its simplicity, configurability, and modularity, making it highly valued by DevOps teams for bespoke configurations. It offers robust load balancing and application delivery capabilities. HAProxy offers flexibility, reliability, and a wide range of load-balancing algorithms, alongside customizable configuration options and advanced traffic rules.
Room for Improvement: NGINX Plus could enhance its scalability options and module management interface. Its high pricing needs reconsideration for users requiring basic features. HAProxy should improve its usability for clustering and dynamic configuration. Better documentation, logging features, and a modern GUI are also needed.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NGINX Plus is typically deployed in hybrid and on-premises environments, with users noting strong community support and good technical documentation. HAProxy is often deployed on-premises, with users relying heavily on community support. Professional support is rated satisfactory. NGINX Plus's community engagement is noted as superior.
Pricing and ROI: NGINX offers both free and paid versions, with NGINX Plus offering advanced features at a higher cost. Despite flexible pricing models, some find it expensive compared to hardware alternatives. HAProxy is praised for being cost-effective, mainly due to its free open-source version and simpler licensing, providing better value for money in enterprise deployments.
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.
Response time is good because they have assigned and dedicated support engineers to us, and we have weekly cadence calls.
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.
While some people use NGINX for web servers, my current use case focuses on networking and tunneling, which does not necessitate much scaling.
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.
I require ninety-nine point nine percent uptime, and NGINX has been pivotal in helping me achieve this along with our other DNS services.
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.
NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates.
As with any application, there were initial issues, however, after receiving support, everything was rectified.
There were some vulnerabilities in F5.
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.
My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.
The solution offers a cost advantage.
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.
For API management, the WebSocket, and the WebServer, NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support.
The web application firewall feature has helped enhance security for our applications because most of the attacks which are performed on our website are being blocked by it.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| HAProxy | 10.4% |
| NGINX Plus | 6.7% |
| Other | 82.9% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
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.
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.
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