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Fortinet FortiADC vs HAProxy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.2
Fortinet FortiADC is chosen for reliable load management, security, and support, offering moderate ROI and essential performance.
Sentiment score
7.1
HAProxy's open-source load balancer cuts costs, boosts efficiency, improves uptime, reduces staffing, and enhances scalability for users.
The alert system is efficient, sending alerts within a fraction of a second if any power issues arise.
Senior Network Engineer at SP SYSNET PTE. LTD.
Operational efficiency has improved; we no longer have staff consistently monitoring backend servers during deployment or scaling events, as HAProxy's health checks and hitless reloads allow us to push changes with minimal manual intervention.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
This resulted in a drastic decrease in costs and, at the same time, the accuracy of the hits coming on HAProxy was almost around 100% or 99.99%.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
I estimate seeing a return on investment with HAProxy, as it significantly reduced staff requirements and enhanced scaling capabilities, particularly when transitioning from NGINX, which faced issues.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
Fortinet FortiADC customer service is praised for effective support but varies in response time and relies on ticket prioritization.
Sentiment score
6.5
HAProxy's customer service and technical support are highly rated for quick, expert assistance, though documentation could improve.
The support team is knowledgeable and efficiently assists with automation and configuration problems.
Security Network Architect at Inmac
It varies depending on the engineer assigned; in most cases, we resolve issues on the first attempt.
Senior Technical Engineer at Safezone Secure Solutions Private Limited
The service is helpful yet not excellent.
Senior Network Engineer at SP SYSNET PTE. LTD.
Since we are utilizing the open-source edition, community forums, mailing lists, and GitHub have been invaluable, with typically someone having encountered the same problems we faced.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Fortinet FortiADC provides scalable solutions with virtual and cloud options, though performance varies by model and infrastructure needs.
Sentiment score
7.9
HAProxy efficiently handles scalability, easily adapting configurations for growing traffic, ideal for small to medium businesses and larger environments.
For those opting for a SaaS or cloud solution, there is scalability and flexibility.
Senior Technical Engineer at Safezone Secure Solutions Private Limited
It is scalable for some versions, however, as components reach their end of support, upgrades are necessary to maintain scalability.
Security Network Architect at Inmac
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Fortinet FortiADC is praised for stability, reliable operation, effective support, and minor issues resolved through firmware updates.
Sentiment score
8.1
HAProxy is reliable, handles heavy traffic efficiently, with minimal downtime, quick support, and frequent updates enhancing stability and performance.
The support system is reliable when issues like automation or configuration arise.
Security Network Architect at Inmac
Overall, it has been good; in the past it was very good, and now it is still performing well.
Senior Technical Engineer at Safezone Secure Solutions Private Limited
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
CEo at CloudPositive
We have reduced a lot of servers, replacing them with one or two HAProxy servers which deliver better performance, accuracy, and an almost 100% success rate with requests.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
 

Room For Improvement

Fortinet FortiADC needs advancements in algorithms, UI, support, documentation, scalability, features, pricing, licensing, performance, cloud, and AI integration.
HAProxy needs a revamped GUI, improved APIs, better AWS integration, real-time config, enhanced docs, and stronger monitoring and security.
Fortinet has been a pioneer for enterprise solutions, such as firewalls, SASE, ZTNA, and SD-WAN solutions, and they are in a leader quadrant.
Senior Technical Engineer at Safezone Secure Solutions Private Limited
The limitation of managing all components and the differing versions pose challenges.
Security Network Architect at Inmac
If I need design help, they do not assist; they say it is a design issue they cannot support, and I must approach the system integrator.
Senior Network Engineer at SP SYSNET PTE. LTD.
The configuration syntax is powerful yet can become overwhelming for newcomers; a more beginner-friendly interface or a native GUI without relying on third-party tools would ease the onboarding process.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Fortinet FortiADC is affordable compared to competitors, with flexible licensing, varying costs, and potential discounts based on configurations.
Enterprise users value HAProxy's competitive pricing and cost-effective licensing, especially compared to F5 and Citrix, despite initial setup costs.
This solution is quite expensive compared to Kemp.
Senior Network Engineer at SP SYSNET PTE. LTD.
Since we use the open-source edition, there are no licensing fees, with the main cost being the infrastructure running on EC2 instances in AWS, which helps maintain low expenses.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Fortinet FortiADC excels in load balancing, security, and ease of integration, offering scalable, reliable, and comprehensive traffic management solutions.
Users praise HAProxy for reliable load balancing, customization, low latency, open-source benefits, and advanced features like secure traffic management.
I use server load balancing and employ layer seven features, which provide more granular traffic shaping and detailed logs.
Senior Network Engineer at SP SYSNET PTE. LTD.
When integrated with FortiAnalyzer, it has much more significance.
Senior Technical Engineer at Safezone Secure Solutions Private Limited
FortiADC provides load-balancing capabilities needed for integration with other Fortinet platforms.
Security Network Architect at Inmac
By moving all SSL termination to the load balancer, I now manage certificates in a single place, and I can also utilize Let's Encrypt with HAProxy's built-in ACME support, making renewal automatic.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
HAProxy positively impacted our organization by exceeding scalability expectations, initially projected at 200k requests but ultimately handling over 15 million transactions per second without any issues.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
As a production engineer at that time, I definitely wanted to ensure that the system could handle massive connections, especially since we operated an e-commerce platform where we could not lose any customer calls.
CEo at CloudPositive
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiADC
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HAProxy
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (7th), Service Mesh (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiADC is 9.8%, up from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 9.9%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HAProxy9.9%
Fortinet FortiADC9.8%
Other80.3%
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

GANESAN K - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Engineer at Safezone Secure Solutions Private Limited
Has supported load balancing for medical applications and could benefit from more custom configuration options
Some customers need custom management for handling their applications across the servers. Instead of having a predefined solution, if we had space for custom-based algorithms to load balance the traffic, it would be better. We have faced such cases with A10, where we can leverage many custom scripts and do much more. Even though A10 primarily focuses on SMBs, they have also ventured into the enterprise market. Fortinet has been a pioneer for enterprise solutions, such as firewalls, SASE, ZTNA, and SD-WAN solutions, and they are in a leader quadrant. Therefore, they should have more options. From a pricing perspective, it is expensive.
Shrinivas Devarkonda - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
Handles high traffic efficiently and simplifies complex routing with rule-based logic
I think HAProxy is good as it stands now, but I believe there could be improvements. gRPC has recently been implemented, which is great, along with TLS 1.2 and 1.3 support, and HTTP 2.0 is also available. However, I'm unsure about the benchmark of those HTTP 2.0 requests on HAProxy. If there were any other protocol with better performance than HTTP 2.0, or perhaps mTLS and other similar features, including that in HAProxy would be really great. For improvements, I think that during setup and configuration, the steps provided are neat and clear. Anyone can easily install and configure it. There are many kernel tuning parameters also available, which is great. For specific improvement, in terms of logging, I think printing the full object of the request may help, or if there's a way to reference two requests, it would be beneficial to find a complete session history from a logged-in customer, as it would help analyze customer and user analytics.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?
For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.
Do you recommend Fortinet FortiADC?
I recommend Fortinet FortiADC. My experience with Fortinet has been very positive. Our company has been using it for around five years. We mainly use FortiADC for the load balancing of application ...
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiADC?
The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily.
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?
Since we used the open-source version, we were not concerned about pricing, setup cost, or licensing.
 

Also Known As

FortiADC Application Delivery Controller, FortiADC
HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiADC vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.