HAProxy vs Traefik Enterprise comparison

HAProxy and Traefik Labs are both solutions in the Service Mesh category. HAProxy is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2, while Traefik Labs is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.5. HAProxy holds a 14.1% mindshare in SM, compared to Traefik Labs’s 9.5% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of HAProxy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Traefik Labs users who would recommend it.

HAProxy

Read 47 HAProxy reviews

5,819 Views
1,106 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Traefik Enterprise

Read 3 Traefik Enterprise reviews

1,506 Views
542 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

HAProxy

Traefik Enterprise

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Traefik Enterprise based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, HAProxy, Kong and others in Service Mesh.

To learn more, read our detailed Service Mesh Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

January 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

HAProxy

Ranking in Service Mesh

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (7th)

Traefik Enterprise

Ranking in Service Mesh

5th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

API Management (19th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 14.1%, up from 13.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Traefik Enterprise is 9.5%, up from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Service Mesh Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
HAProxy	14.1%
Traefik Enterprise	9.5%
Other	76.4%

Service Mesh

Featured Reviews

Shrinivas Devarkonda

Head of DevOps at TripFactory

Handles high traffic efficiently and simplifies complex routing with rule-based logic

I think HAProxy is good as it stands now, but I believe there could be improvements. gRPC has recently been implemented, which is great, along with TLS 1.2 and 1.3 support, and HTTP 2.0 is also available. However, I'm unsure about the benchmark of those HTTP 2.0 requests on HAProxy. If there were any other protocol with better performance than HTTP 2.0, or perhaps mTLS and other similar features, including that in HAProxy would be really great. For improvements, I think that during setup and configuration, the steps provided are neat and clear. Anyone can easily install and configure it. There are many kernel tuning parameters also available, which is great. For specific improvement, in terms of logging, I think printing the full object of the request may help, or if there's a way to reference two requests, it would be beneficial to find a complete session history from a logged-in customer, as it would help analyze customer and user analytics.

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AnkanSaha

Full Stack Developer at Hoichoi

Single endpoint has simplified microservice routing and has improved traffic monitoring

I would appreciate improvements to the user interface because it currently appears generic. Please add more professional elements to the UI. I need this because when I open this site in public, everyone says it was built by a college student. I would love for the UI to be professional. For other things, you should orchestrate the features list on the home page and add other things. You should not mention everything. You should mention on the home page which feature I last used so I can go there directly without navigating through settings and multiple menus. If I use any feature repeatedly, it should appear on the home page.

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

"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."

"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."

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

"With centralized SSL termination and automated renewals now in place, that time requirement has dropped to nearly zero hours, translating to dozens of hours saved per year."

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

"Scalable and inexpensive."

"HAProxy has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to manage configurations; I put configuration files on the Ceph storage shared across the whole cluster, allowing me to write my configuration, change it easily in one place, and reload it."

More HAProxy pros

"The tool handles scalability pretty easily. Adding more instances of services and all are pretty intuitive to do using Traefik Enterprise."

"Traefik Enterprise has positively impacted my organization by making myself and my colleagues more efficient, allowing us to invest more time in other tasks because we are comfortable knowing how Traefik Enterprise operates and the automation we implemented with it."

"Traefik Enterprise is helping us tremendously because we do not need to manage multiple service domains."

Cons

"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."

"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."

"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."

"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."

"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."

"The visibility could be improved."

"Improving the documentation with multiple examples and scenarios would be beneficial. Most users encounter similar situations, so having a variety of scenarios readily available on the tool's website would be helpful. For instance, if I were part of the HAProxy team, I'd create a webpage with different scenarios and provide files for each scenario. This way, users wouldn't have to start from scratch every time."

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

More HAProxy cons

"One should be able to just check things straight up from the UI and get to know what kind of issues are there in the solution, and even though such a feature is already there in the tool, there is more work to be done in it."

"I would appreciate improvements to the user interface because it currently appears generic."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."

"It is free of cost."

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

"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."

"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."

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

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

"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"I would say that Traefik Enterprise is cheaper than the other alternatives in the market."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Media Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	16

No data available

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-source product. HAProxy is also a good choice for someone looking for a stable ...

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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?

Since we used the open-source version, we were not concerned about pricing, setup cost, or licensing.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Traefik Enterprise?

One of the reasons why my company moved from Envoy, as well as the other in-house options, to Traefik Enterprise was because doing many things in-house was overkill. Traefik Enterprise was a relati...

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What needs improvement with Traefik Enterprise?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Traefik Enterprise?

I use Traefik Enterprise for my daily needs, including load balancing and centralizing my cloud-native applications. At Hoichoi, we have been using Traefik Enterprise for the last two years. We imp...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 11% of the time

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

Compared 10% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 23% of the time

Apache APISIX vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 22% of the time

Tyk vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 12% of the time

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 8% of the time

WSO2 API Manager vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

January 2026

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

API Management

January 2026

Download Traefik Enterprise product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

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

Traefik Enterprise is a powerful tool for managing microservices and reverse proxy needs, offering load balancing, dynamic configurations, and comprehensive ingress controller capabilities.

Traefik Enterprise stands out for its integration with Kubernetes, robust API management, and security features like TLS termination and authentication. Its flexibility and scalability make it suitable for handling large-scale traffic efficiently. Users particularly value its ease of deployment, automatic service discovery, and dynamic configuration capabilities. The integrated dashboard provides detailed metrics for monitoring traffic, ensuring performance and reliability. However, some users find the documentation insufficient and the initial setup challenging. Performance issues under heavy load and difficulties with backend system integrations are also noted concerns.

What are the key features of Traefik Enterprise?

Ease of Deployment: Simplifies the installation and configuration process.
Dynamic Configuration: Supports real-time updates without restarts.
Automatic Service Discovery: Automatically detects new services and integrates them.
Load Balancing: Distributes traffic evenly across services.
Security Integration: Features like TLS termination and Let's Encrypt integration to enhance security.
Comprehensive Dashboard: Detailed metrics and intuitive interface for traffic monitoring.
Kubernetes and Docker Support: Seamlessly integrates with modern application stacks.

What benefits should users look for in the reviews?

Scalability: Ability to handle large-scale traffic efficiently.
Enhanced Security: Advanced security features for protecting data and services.
Real-time Monitoring: Detailed and intuitive dashboard for comprehensive traffic monitoring.
Ease of Integration: Smooth integration with Kubernetes and Docker environments.
Service Reliability: Effective load balancing and automatic service discovery.

In industries like e-commerce, finance, and technology, Traefik Enterprise is used to manage heavy traffic loads and ensure secure API management. Its capability to integrate with Kubernetes and Docker makes it a preferred choice for companies leveraging modern tech stacks. While some may find the initial setup challenging, the benefits in scalability, security, and monitoring often outweigh the drawbacks. For these sectors, the enhanced traffic management and robust security features are critical.

Traefik Labs

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, HAProxy, Kong and others in Service Mesh. Updated: January 2026.

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