TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

HAProxy Community Edition

Score9.3 out of 10

21 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is HAProxy Community Edition?

HAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about HAProxy Community Edition.
View all reviews

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

Incentivized
AMJITH LAL SView profile
Senior Network Administrator in Information Technology at AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM (5001-10,000 employees employees)

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

Most Important Features

  • Round Robin selects servers in turns. This is the default and precise algorthm
  • Using layer 7 allows the load balancer to forward requests to different backend servers based on the content of the user’s request
  • Improved the security of all the production servers to a large extent.

Return on Investment

  • Improved the flexibility of server migration with this implementation
  • Cost effective way when compared to traditional firewall based load balancers
  • Could save the Server attributes like cpu cores, memory to a large extent

HA Proxy a great balancer.

Incentivized
José Javier Dominguez ReinaView profile
Jefe de Proyecto in Information Technology at SANDETEL (201-500 employees employees)

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

Most Important Features

  • Load balancing.
  • Have multiple SSL certificates configured.
  • High performance and low latency.

Return on Investment

  • Low Cost, Open Source
  • Load balancing
  • High performance and low latency.

Alternatives Considered

NGINX, F5 BIG-IP and Envoy Proxy

Other Software Used

NGINX, Apache HTTP Server, DNSimple

HA Proxy Review

Incentivized
Andrew MeyerView profile
Unix Hosting Engineer in Engineering at CenturyLink Technology Solutions (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Load balancing
  • Clustering

Cons

  • Configuration examples

Return on Investment

  • Low-cost deployment
  • Limited support for free product
  • Mailing list response is not the quickest (maybe implement a forum?)

Alternatives Considered

F5 BIG-IP and Kemp LoadMaster

Other Software Used

Kemp LoadMaster

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

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (501-1000 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • HAProxy has been the perfect solution for our environment, and it's free!

Alternatives Considered

F5 BIG-IP

An excellent low cost load balancer

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
  • Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.

Alternatives Considered

F5 BIG-IP and Citrix NetScaler

Other Software Used

F5 BIG-IP, Citrix NetScaler, Atom, Cisco ASA, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, Cisco Nexus, Cisco Catalyst Switches, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, Palo Alto Panorama, Ansible, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Sublime Text, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Windows Server, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, NetScout nGeniusONE, NetBrain

Usability