HAProxy Reviews & Product Details

We've been using HAProxy for around a decade, initially starting with the Community Edition and gradually expanding its footprint. We used industry-standard SLBs from major vendors, but the exorbitant price tags and outrageous support costs were becoming unsustainable. Two years ago, we leaped HAProxy Enterprise Edition (HAPEE) with the Fusion Control Plane (FCP), and it's been a game-changer.

Here's what we love:

Performance: HAPEE's performance is impressive. Even without leveraging hardware acceleration (which they support through Xeon Platinum chips), it easily handles our traffic load.

Stability: Since migrating, we've experienced rock-solid stability. HAPEE has proven to be a reliable workhorse.

Full configurability: HAPEE offers complete control and customization, allowing us to tailor it precisely to our needs.

Fusion Control Plane (FCP): The FCP has revolutionized our workflow, enabling full transactional changes across our clusters. This was a huge pain point with our previous solutions.

Unbeatable Support: This is arguably HAPEE's strongest point. The support team is phenomenal. They're available through Slack, providing near-instantaneous responses and practical solutions. We've dealt with companies charging 10x or 30x more for support that pales in comparison. HAProxy's support team sets a new standard.

Cost-Effectiveness: The pricing for HAPEE is significantly lower than any other comparable solution on the market. It's a breath of fresh air after years of being squeezed by our previous vendors.

Community Edition: We also utilize the HAProxy Community Edition for simpler micro-deployments, and it also excels in that role.

We've moved to HAProxy EE, and the cost/performance/support are so good we are not looking back. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Honestly, there's not much to dislike, but the Fusion Control Plane (FCP) has some growing pains. While it does many things exceptionally well, it's still under active development, and occasional kinks need to be ironed out, or some things you would expect haven't been implemented yet. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My company has used HA since I started 6 years ago and all I can say when a tool is rock solid and it works it just works. We have 3 total proxys loadbalanced between our stage and production systems and it handles the load traffic perfectly. The support in the slack channel is a highlight especially if your trying to find a solution for a rule or a way to rewrite a rule to optimize it. Overall, I highly recommend HAProxy for anyone looking for a robust and efficient load balancing solution. It can also add WAF support if you don't want deal with a dedicated WAF provider. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The dislike are small but can bite you from time to time for newcomers that use apache or nginx the language curve could be alot to over come but HA does have a good wiki to find out rules. Besides that I don't have any issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

HAProxy stands out for its exceptional performance in dynamic and high-load environments, making. The addition of the Fusion control plane further enhances its capabilities, providing powerful tools for managing and securing large-scale deployments. Whether you need efficient load balancing, comprehensive observability, or advanced security, HAProxy with Fusion offers a robust solution.

Customer service was wonderul to work with. I had two initial questions that were solved easily from support over email. This made implementation quick and easy. Converting our NGINX over to HAProxy was a trivial and the Fusion Control Plan intergrates well and makes changes and versioning easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For smaller deployments a single node with Fusion deployment would be ideal. We work with a lot of SMB businesses that the price is limiting our options for HAProxy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about HAProxy is its robustness and flexibility in load balancing and proxying. It's highly efficient at distributing traffic across multiple servers, which improves application scalability and reliability. HAProxy also supports advanced features like SSL termination, sticky sessions, and health checks, making it ideal for managing complex, high-traffic environments. The level of configuration it offers allows fine-grained control over traffic management, which is especially useful for optimizing performance and fault tolerance. Plus, it’s open-source, so it’s accessible and customizable for different use cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One downside of HAProxy is its steep learning curve, especially for those who are new to load balancing or have less experience with networking concepts. Its configuration files can become quite complex and difficult to manage for larger setups, especially when you have many backend services or advanced routing rules. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I've known about HAProxy for years and always heard good things about it. We've been users of the CE version for years now and it is software that makes sense, does what it advertises and its fast, not bloated.

We certainly like the dataplane API and the flexibility it offers. Some people might dislike having to configure something via the command line (at least in the CE version) but as someone that has done this for decades, this is a plus to us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would love for an automatic way to save transient data in the CE version, but I understand there being none. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

HAProxy is a powerful and lightweight load balancer, and Windows users can also run it easily using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) or Docker. The configuration is straightforward, making it a great choice for both beginners and advanced users looking to optimize their application’s performance. Highly recommended for anyone needing a reliable reverse proxy! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

HAProxy’s configuration can be complex, especially for users who are not comfortable working with command-line tools and detailed configuration files Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Top notich support!

Flexible and customizable load balancing features.

Reliable and high-performing platform.

Comprehensive documentation.

Excellent value compaired to other solutions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Initial learning curve

Number of servers required for an setup Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We were looking into alternatives to using the Nginx Ingress Controller for one of our products. Their team was super responsive and helpful throughout the entire process. Their technical team was able to resolve all the concerns and questions we had. We ended up not going with the product as we are a lean startup trying to preserve our runway, but we have it in our backpocket if we ever switch. Highly recommend HAProxy to anyone needing their type of service. Their Fusion product has a lot of cool features that can be appealing if needed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No negatives we discovered in our POC. Maybe that we would have to run our own infrastructure. Some startups like to lean towards a fully managed service and be more hands-off. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

HAProxy is straight-forward to configure. The addition of load balancers to the cluster is very fast and easy. Fusion control plane provides a UI for those that prefer it, and can be used to modify the load balancer on the fly. HAPEE also allows for gitops configuration management as a way for us to keep track of changes and maintain a source of truth. The HAProxy team was friendly and helpful, and worked with us to get started on our Proof of Concept quickly. Eric at HAProxy was very knowledgeable and has been very responsive with our questions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Currently, we're not able to get tcp logging to write back to the fusion control plane. We can still review the logs on the local load balancer nodes, and all the tcp connections work perfectly, but it would be nice to have the logs show in the fusion control plane. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The granularity of control and the extra features that HAProxy has added to their HAProxy ALOHA offering are fantastic and really augment the base use-case of the HAProxy software as a whole.

There are plenty of information/wizards for initial implementation that really provide a great user experience.

HAProxy support is incredibly quick to respond and overall very helpful and knowledgeable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The web UI could use a bit of an overhaul in terms of features implemented.

A lot of the more granular controls are difficult to implement in the non-text-based part of the web UI. Along with that, the web UI itself is a bit clunky but still very usable and provides a lot of very good information. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.