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HAProxy pros and cons

Vendor: HAProxy

4.1 out of 5

47 reviews
92% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

HAProxy delivers reliable performance with its ease of configuration and centralized SSL management, excelling in scalability for high transaction volumes. Advanced features like anti-DDOS and BGP route injection enhance performance, though room for improvement exists in statistics aggregation, dynamic ACL support, and documentation clarity. Pricing could be more affordable, and logging needs user-friendly mapping to documentation, making technical support essential for users navigating HAProxy's complex infrastructure.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

HAProxy is highly reliable and stable, providing significant savings in potential downtime.

The ease of configuration, comprehensive documentation, and technical support are valuable features.

HAProxy's scalability exceeds expectations, handling high transaction volumes effortlessly.

Centralized SSL termination and configuration management save significant time and resources.

Advanced features like anti-DDOS, BGP route injection, and multiple load-balancing algorithms improve service performance.

CONS

HAProxy lacks aggregated statistics when nbproc is set to more than one, making it difficult to assess overall system metrics from a single point of view.

There's a need for dynamic ACL and port update support, essential for infrastructures relying on randomly allocated ports.

HAProxy's logging can be cryptic and challenging to navigate, especially when trying to map the logs to existing documentation.

Improving HAProxy's pricing model is necessary as there is room for making it more affordable.

Documentation requires enhancement with standard deployment details and a variety of scenarios for better user guidance.

HAProxy Pros review quotes

HA

DevOps Tech Lead at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Dec 12, 2017

Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used.

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DevOps Engineer at a media company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 29, 2018

I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime.

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Software Engineering Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 29, 2018

Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development.

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Expert Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Feb 6, 2018

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

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Software engineer

Apr 11, 2018

It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements.

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SB

Senior Systems Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Apr 12, 2018

The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB-algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none.

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Deputy Manager and Lead - IT Managed Services at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Apr 15, 2018

I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment.

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SI

Sebastian Insausti

Consultor at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 22, 2018

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

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Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company

Apr 22, 2018

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

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Senior Operations Engineer

Apr 22, 2018

It reduced the load on our main load balancers.

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HAProxy Cons review quotes

HA

DevOps Tech Lead at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Dec 12, 2017

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.

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DevOps Engineer at a media company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 29, 2018

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.

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Software Engineering Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 29, 2018

Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime.

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Expert Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Feb 6, 2018

The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is.

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Software engineer

Apr 11, 2018

Maybe HAProxy could be more modular.

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SB

Senior Systems Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Apr 12, 2018

The web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible).

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Deputy Manager and Lead - IT Managed Services at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Apr 15, 2018

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.

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SI

Sebastian Insausti

Consultor at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 22, 2018

The configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer.

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Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company

Apr 22, 2018

It needs proper HTTP/2 support.

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Senior Operations Engineer

Apr 22, 2018

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

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