HAProxy vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

HAProxy and VMware are both solutions in the Service Mesh category. HAProxy is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.6, while VMware is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.5. HAProxy holds a 14.4% mindshare in SM, compared to VMware’s 2.8% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of HAProxy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of VMware users who would recommend it.

HAProxy

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

7,217 Views
1,443 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

VMware Tanzu Platform

Read 22 VMware Tanzu Platform reviews

7,445 Views
298 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

HAProxy

VMware Tanzu Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

HAProxy and VMware Tanzu Platform offer robust solutions for load balancing and application modernization. VMware Tanzu Platform has the upper hand with its comprehensive features and strong customer support, while HAProxy is preferred for its pricing and support.

Features: HAProxy users find reliability, high performance, and wide protocol support valuable. VMware Tanzu Platform users value comprehensive container orchestration, advanced security, and integrated DevOps tools.

Room for Improvement: HAProxy users suggest enhancing GUI functionalities, better documentation for complex setups, and streamlined configuration. VMware Tanzu Platform users seek improvements in simplifying configuration processes, better integration capabilities, and more user-friendly interfaces.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HAProxy is straightforward to deploy but has mixed customer support experiences. VMware Tanzu Platform has a similarly appreciated deployment process and exceptional customer support.

Pricing and ROI: HAProxy is commended for low setup cost and steady ROI. VMware Tanzu Platform users report higher setup costs but acknowledge satisfactory ROI due to its comprehensive feature set.

To learn more, read our detailed HAProxy vs. VMware Tanzu Platform Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

July 2025

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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

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th)

VMware Tanzu Platform

Ranking in Service Mesh

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (14th), PaaS Clouds (13th), Cloud Management (25th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (3rd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 14.4%, up from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 2.8%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Service Mesh

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…

Read full review

DarshanChaudhari

Solutions Architect Hybrid Cloud Practice US/Europe at Tech Mahindra Limited

Empowers seamless connectivity and integration through APIs while offering robust auto-scaling

I am involved in IT services and we provide a solution to customers. We work with VMware, Nutanix, OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible. It offers native services for autoscaling and integrations through APIs, allowing seamless…

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

"It is scalable."

"The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."

"The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this."

"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."

"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."

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

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

"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."

More HAProxy pros

"Tanzu is easy to upgrade and scale, whether we're talking about horizontal or vertical scaling. It is as smooth as possible without any downtime. The platform maintenance, upgrading, and operations part is very smooth."

"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."

"We never experienced any problems with scalability."

"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."

"I have multiple Kubernetes environments within my environment. TMC gives me a single pane view, which is good for managing everything."

"VMware Tanzu Mission Control has many valuable features, such as ease of use and customization."

"The most popular feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is its graphical user interface for describing network policies on the Service Mesh, which is highly integrable with other tools commonly used in supply chains such as security."

"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pros

Cons

"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs."

"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."

"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."

"The visibility could be improved."

"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."

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

"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."

"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."

More HAProxy cons

"One potential area for expansion would be leveraging AI capabilities, which my customer might be interested in exploring as they grow."

"It is not easy to build a solution with containers. It has a graphical user interface, but you need to have a lot of knowledge of Linux and how to work in the command mode. Its support can also be improved. Currently, its biggest disadvantage is that it is a new product, and the clients prefer to go for a solution that has been in the market for a long time. There are not that many people who know this product."

"I would like to see additional support for things outside of Cloud Foundry."

"Customers have noticed a considerable price increase after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom."

"VMware Tanzu Service Mesh could add better integration with other cloud platforms, such as vRealize Automation or VMware vCloud Director for cloud providers."

"The solution is currently focused on VMware infrastructure and I would like to see more options made available."

"Addressing the high upfront costs could improve the product. Implementing a subscription-based model with tiered service options could make it more accessible to a broader range of customers."

"The disaster recovery feature could be improved to provide better tracking of issues. I would also like to see the introduction of a dashboard view, for even further integration of all the areas that Mission Control looks at."

More VMware Tanzu Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The tool is open-source."

"It is free of cost."

"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

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

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

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

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"I would recommend that businesses look into the full price for their requirements. The price is high, but there are some open-source add-ons that can be used for customization while keeping costs down, although these might not be suitable for everyone."

"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."

"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."

"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."

"The licensing cost is expensive."

"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"

"It is not the most expensive option, and I believe the capabilities align well with the value it provides."

"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

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

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

Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...

See all answers

What do you like most about VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

It definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native ap...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution. I would rate the pricing of VMware Tanzu Mission Control as four out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 13% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 13% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

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

Compared 10% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Rancher Labs vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 15% of the time

Kubernetes vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 8% of the time

Docker vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Tanzu Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

August 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Tanzu Platform

July 2025

Download VMware Tanzu Platform product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu

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

VMware Tanzu Platform is designed for cloud-native development and management of Kubernetes, CI/CD processes, microservices, and containerized workloads. It supports deployments both on cloud and on-premises, providing centralized management via Mission Control.

VMware Tanzu Platform offers seamless integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN, supporting centralized cluster management and lifecycle management. The platform provides a GUI for monitoring CI/CD pipelines and network policies, enhancing multi-tenancy and Day 2 operations. Users can easily manage Kubernetes clusters, monitor applications, and integrate with tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Cloud Foundry, and Azure. It ensures compliance and security for service providers, financial institutions, and businesses.

What are the key features of VMware Tanzu Platform?

Integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN: Enhances compatibility and flexibility.
Seamless Cluster Management: Centralized control over Kubernetes clusters.
CI/CD Pipelines and Network Policies: Simplifies monitoring and management.
Multi-tenancy Support: Facilitates resource sharing among multiple users.
Comprehensive Lifecycle Management: Streamlines deployment and scalability.
Observability Platform: Provides enhanced visibility and control.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in VMware Tanzu Platform reviews?

Centralized Management: Simplifies operations and reduces manual effort.
Enhanced Compliance and Security: Meets regulatory requirements.
Flexibility in Deployment: Supports both cloud and on-premises options.
Seamless Integration: Works with multiple vendors and tools.
Developer-Friendly Environment: Improves productivity and innovation.

Industries such as financial institutions, service providers, and businesses requiring rigorous compliance and security deploy VMware Tanzu Platform. These entities benefit from centralized management, streamlined DevOps processes, and integrated tools, enhancing their capabilities in cloud-native developments and containerized workloads.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

July 2025

Free Report: HAProxy vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

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