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HAProxy Community Edition Reviews & Insights

Score9.3 out of 10

21 Reviews and Ratings

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Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for HAProxy Community Edition are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Real-time Hit Logging: Several users have expressed their appreciation for the product's real-time hit logging feature. This feature allows for efficient monitoring of usage and enables users to track and analyze individual public addresses' usage. By reducing overhead on real servers and improving server health, this feature has proven to be highly valuable.

Load Balancing: Many reviewers have found the load balancing capability of the product to be highly beneficial. They have mentioned that it provides high availability of applications and evenly distributes traffic across systems. This feature optimizes resource utilization and improves overall system performance, making it a key advantage for users.

Clustering: The clustering capability of the product has been widely applauded by reviewers. Clustering allows for the creation of interconnected servers that function as a single system. This enhances scalability and fault tolerance, ensuring high availability even in case of individual server failures. Users appreciate this feature for its ability to maintain uninterrupted services.

HAProxy Community Edition Reviews

7 Reviews

HA at its best, secure and reliable load balancing for production servers

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HAProxy is used in our server environment for our academic purposes mainly for exam management servers that require high availability and security in on-premises. Also since it is open source it can easily be used for testing in demo servers irrespective of the platform it belongs. We also depend this integration to our public ip addresses.

Pros

  • Real-time hit logging allows us to monitor the usage efficiently
  • Saves the usage of individual public addresses to a large extent.
  • Reduces the overhead on real servers and improves overall health of servers

Cons

  • lacks a feature oriented graphical dashboard
  • Installations are linux oriented, not available in all platforms
  • More algorithms are required for routing in enterprises

Likelihood to Recommend

It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
AL
AMJITH LAL S
Senior Network Administrator in Information Technology at AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM (5001-10,000 employees)
Vetted Review
HAProxy Community Edition
2 years of experience
View profile

HA Proxy a great balancer.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use HA Proxy as a proxy server and as a balancer for servers (layer 4, IP) and for applications (layer 7).In this way, we manage to have part of the content of the applications cached and we also balance the load of an application between several servers. In this way, we can provide high availability and balanced service with low economic cost.

Pros

  • Load balancing
  • Proxy for TCP an HTTP/HTTPS
  • High availability of applications

Cons

  • SSL certificate management
  • Configuration only by text files
  • Setting criteria to decide load balancing

Likelihood to Recommend

In our company, we use the HA Proxy to balance internal applications or external applications with a number of connections that are not too excessive. For critical applications or with a huge number of connections we use a hardware balancer. In this way, we manage to minimize the economic costs of the infrastructures.
JJ
José Javier Dominguez Reina
Jefe de Proyecto in Information Technology at SANDETEL (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
HAProxy Community Edition
4 years of experience
View profile

HAProxy - the right tool for load-balancing, traffic direction, and SSL Offloading.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HAProxy is used by the entire organization to handle public endpoint SSL offload and traffic redirection. It also allows for complete flexibility to modify the traffic during ingress. It allows us to modify our configuration on-the-fly with no downtime.

Pros

  • Extensive capabilities with very flexible configuration.
  • Live configuration change and management with no downtime.
  • High traffic throughput - incredibly fast.

Cons

  • Improved API level access - but I believe this is coming soon.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anytime you need to balance load or direct traffic based on rule sets, either at the edge or internally, HAProxy is the perfect solution.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
HAProxy Community Edition
7 years of experience

HAProxy is an excellent load balancer

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is an excellent software load balancer. it is very configurable and easy to manage. We use it in multiple places in our organization. We are using it to manage around 20 microservices. So far we haven't faced any issues. We deployed it using Keepalived to make it highly available all the time.

Pros

  • Load balancing.
  • SSL/TLS termination.
  • Health checking.

Cons

  • Can't think of anything at this time.

Likelihood to Recommend

HAProxy is useful for both level 4 and level 7 load balancing, SSL termination, etc. It is a software load balancer, so it is not good in cases where we need a hardware load balancing to solve our business problems. It is a bit memory intensive, so we need to watch out for it.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
HAProxy Community Edition
3 years of experience

An excellent low cost load balancer

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HAProxy works extremely well as a low-cost alternative to more expensive load balancers such as our F5s and Netscalers that we're using in some areas of our network. The cost of free is also pretty hard to argue with especially when compared to the prices of those F5s and Netscalers.

Pros

  • Low-Cost Load Balancer
  • Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
  • Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
  • SSL Termination

Cons

  • My understanding is a lack of support for UDP traffic
  • One mistake in the haproxy.cfg prevents the entire thing from starting rather than only affecting the part of the config file that may have a typo of some other syntax problem.

Likelihood to Recommend

I've had good experiences with most things that I've attempted using HAProxy. About the only thing I haven't tried yet is setting up an HA Pair using VRRP which I just found out is even a possibility. But it does great at terminating SSL on HTTPS VIPs which is most of what I've used it for, About the only thing I haven't figured out yet is one specific use case I have setup on a pair of F5s for syslog forwarding to multiple destinations, but I also haven't spent a ton of time looking into it since I think there's a limitation with UDP traffic and HAProxy.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
HAProxy Community Edition
2 years of experience

HAProxy - Look no further - THE only load balancing solution you will ever need

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use HAProxy primarily to load balance our traffic to our systems. It allows us to have highly available systems that we can easily scale out on in as necessary. We also use it to load balance traffic to our database servers, so load is evenly distributed, and it we want to add or remove a node(s) we can do so without adjusting any application configs.

Pros

  • Allow traffic to systems to be distributed evenly, providing high availability
  • Allow restrictions to resources using OAuth tokens
  • Allow load balancing of databases

Cons

  • A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.

Likelihood to Recommend

HAProxy is a lightweight load balancer that just works. It requires a minimal footprint and really just works once set up correctly. It can balance a web app, APIs, database connections and more. I've used competing products that just don't compete with HAProxy in my experience. The community version is rock solid, as is the enterprise edition.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
HAProxy Community Edition
3 years of experience

HA Proxy Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I currently have HAProxy set up for myself. It is acting as a front end to my MariaDB and PostgreSQL databases. I also have it handling my postfix setup between my site-to-site VPN tunnels. It works great! The stats page helps a lot!

Pros

  • Load balancing
  • Clustering

Cons

  • Configuration examples

Likelihood to Recommend

For an open source load balancer, this is great. Works easily out of the box. Configuration is what will take the longest amount of time. But it will expose you to how a load balancer works.
AM
Andrew Meyer
Unix Hosting Engineer in Engineering at CenturyLink Technology Solutions (5001-10,000 employees)
Vetted Review
HAProxy Community Edition
2 years of experience
View profile