Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs HAProxy comparison

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

6,550 Views
4,229 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC and HAProxy are products designed to enhance application performance through efficient load balancing. While Barracuda excels in customer support and pricing, HAProxy is deemed superior due to its robust feature set.

Features: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is recognized for comprehensive security features, ease of use in handling SSL offloading, and application protection. HAProxy provides strong flexibility, advanced routing capabilities, and support for a wide range of protocols.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC offers seamless deployment with excellent technical support, ensuring minimal downtime. HAProxy, with extensive customization options, requires more technical expertise, impacting deployment time.

Pricing and ROI: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC has a higher initial setup cost but promises ROI through support services and bundled security features. HAProxy's lower upfront cost appeals to budget-conscious buyers, benefiting from its open-source nature for long-term savings, but may require technical expertise affecting operational costs. Barracuda provides a more predictable cost structure for quicker ROI, whereas HAProxy offers a financially lower barrier to entry.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: April 2025).

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. HAProxy

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 851,604 peers since 2012

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

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HAProxy

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Service Mesh (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is 1.4%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 12.4%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Roni Wijaya

Vice President of It Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

A simple and powerful solution with WAF feature

The solution is simple and powerful. I find the Barracuda Load Balancer ADC's load balancing function most valuable. It balances the traffic well. The security features, like the Web Application Firewall, are also very helpful. I use the SSL offloading feature too. It's very helpful because it prevents overload. Our application runs on HTTP, but we upload HTTPS on the load balancer. This means there are no performance issues. I think it's very helpful.

Read full review

Bhaskar Rao

Network manager admin at Yamaha

Open-source, simple to install, and reliable

Although HAProxy is essentially open-source, many features are not available. While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source. We are only experiencing problems at that time. Otherwise, everything is fine. Because we need to search for a document or some troubleshooting information. That could be beneficial to us. To resolve the troubleshooting issues, additional documentation and troubleshooting are required. The product is satisfactory. However, additional documentation, additional technical documents, and troubleshooting steps are the types of things that can only make this solution better. Also, more clarity on where the package is hitting and where it is stopping is needed.

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

"The price is very good, and it's not very expensive."

"I would rate the stability of Barracuda Load Balancer as a ten out of ten; it has high stability."

"The solution is simple and powerful. I find the Barracuda Load Balancer ADC's load balancing function most valuable. It balances the traffic well. The security features, like the Web Application Firewall, are also very helpful."

"Barracuda's technical support is good - whenever we have an issue, they immediately connect and resolve it."

"The most useful features in Barracuda Load Balancer are its security capabilities, load balancing efficiency, and scalability."

"The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something."

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

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

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

"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"

"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."

"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."

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

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"The Barracuda Load Balancer ADC could be improved with more customization features. For example, F5 uses iRules for custom configurations. I haven't found something similar in Barracuda yet. The load balancer and WAF's basic and common features are enough, but we need more customization options."

"There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic."

"Load Balancer ADC is competitively priced, but it's not feature-rich, and its technology is not that advanced."

"There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic."

"The quality of the solution's performance could be improved."

"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)."

"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."

"The solution can be improved by controlling TCP behavior better and mandating to clients what the expected outcome must be in order to avoid receiving contestant timeout logs."

"They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers. Also, they need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration."

"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."

"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 product does not have any new technologies."

"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."

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Load Balancer ADC is cost-effective and is about half the price of F5."

"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."

"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."

"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."

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

"The tool is open-source."

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

"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."

"It is free of cost."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Retailer

10%

Construction Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

Pricing for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC can be a consideration. However, it offers good value with its cost-saving benefits and efficient operation, balancing the initial financial outlay.

What needs improvement with Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic. Also, more could be done to enhance the initial setup, as it can be c...

What is your primary use case for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

The typical use case for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC involves managing and distributing network traffic efficiently to maintain system performance. Clients use Barracuda Load Balancer ADC for its a...

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 ...

What do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

NetScaler vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Comparisons

Compared 36% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Compared 27% of the time

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Compared 12% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Compared 11% of the time

More Barracuda Load Balancer ADC Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 14% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

May 2025

Download Barracuda Load Balancer ADC product report

Download HAProxy product report

May 2025

Also Known As

Barracuda Load Balancer

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Overview

Barracuda Load Balancer is ideal for organizations looking for a high-performance, yet cost-effective application delivery and security solution. With the broadest range of hardware and virtual models, Barracuda Load Balancer provides maximum flexibility for organizations looking to build highly secure and scalable application infrastructure, whether it's deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

Barracuda Networks

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.

Sample Customers

Fenwal Blood Technologies

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