

Fortinet FortiADC and HAProxy are competing in the application delivery controller market. HAProxy often gains an edge in complex network environments due to its superior customization and scalability, whereas Fortinet FortiADC is recognized for its comprehensive security integration.
Features: Fortinet FortiADC is known for its integration with Fortinet products, advanced threat protection, and seamless firewall integration. HAProxy offers dynamic load balancing, high availability, and advanced traffic management capabilities.
Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiADC could benefit from more customization options and greater scalability beyond Fortinet ecosystems. HAProxy might improve by simplifying its user interface and streamlining initial deployment, as well as providing more direct support channels rather than relying heavily on community support.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiADC provides streamlined deployment and strong support, especially for existing Fortinet users. HAProxy's open-source nature requires technical understanding but allows high adaptability, supported by a robust community.
Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiADC has higher initial costs but offers strong ROI for security-centered solutions through comprehensive integration. HAProxy presents lower upfront costs and a scalable, flexible open-source model offering high ROI possibilities for adaptable and cost-efficient deployments.
The alert system is efficient, sending alerts within a fraction of a second if any power issues arise.
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.
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%.
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.
The support team is knowledgeable and efficiently assists with automation and configuration problems.
It varies depending on the engineer assigned; in most cases, we resolve issues on the first attempt.
The service is helpful yet not excellent.
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.
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
For those opting for a SaaS or cloud solution, there is scalability and flexibility.
It is scalable for some versions, however, as components reach their end of support, upgrades are necessary to maintain scalability.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
The support system is reliable when issues like automation or configuration arise.
Overall, it has been good; in the past it was very good, and now it is still performing well.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
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.
Fortinet has been a pioneer for enterprise solutions, such as firewalls, SASE, ZTNA, and SD-WAN solutions, and they are in a leader quadrant.
The limitation of managing all components and the differing versions pose challenges.
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.
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.
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
This solution is quite expensive compared to Kemp.
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.
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
I use server load balancing and employ layer seven features, which provide more granular traffic shaping and detailed logs.
When integrated with FortiAnalyzer, it has much more significance.
FortiADC provides load-balancing capabilities needed for integration with other Fortinet platforms.
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.
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.
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.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| HAProxy | 9.9% |
| Fortinet FortiADC | 9.8% |
| Other | 80.3% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 12 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 7 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
Fortinet FortiADC is a robust application delivery controller (ADC) that delivers application optimization, application security, and application availability. FortiADC is a valued offering from Fortinet, which is widely recognized as a trusted supplier of dynamic security solutions worldwide. FortiADC offers dynamic security functions (AV, DDoS, and WAF) in addition to advanced application connectors for a simplified deployment and complete transparency to an organization's networks and applications. FortiADC offers three primary deployment options: physical machine, virtual machine, (VM) and cloud solution options.
Fortinet FortiADC Benefits
Fortinet FortiADC Features
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
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.
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