

HAProxy and HashiCorp Consul are both leaders in load balancing and service discovery. HashiCorp Consul stands out with its features, making it a superior choice for many users who find it worth the extra cost.
Features: HAProxy is praised for its robust load balancing capabilities, high performance, and stability. HashiCorp Consul offers comprehensive service discovery, configuration management, and a wide range of integrations.
Room for Improvement: HAProxy needs a more intuitive configuration process, enhanced documentation, and easier management tools. HashiCorp Consul could improve its complexity, troubleshooting tools, and user interface.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HAProxy is known for its straightforward deployment process and responsive customer service. HashiCorp Consul can be more complex to deploy but is also well-regarded in customer service.
Pricing and ROI: HAProxy is seen as cost-effective with a strong return on investment. HashiCorp Consul justifies its higher setup cost with extensive service discovery and automation capabilities.
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.
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.
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.
HashiCorp Consul is scaling great; I think we are seeing exactly what we need for communication.
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.
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.
I think the documentation sometimes can be better; it needs to make it easier for our developers to understand how to interact with it.
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.
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.
We are looking for our applications to communicate more easily without having to define IP addresses and other configuration details.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| HAProxy | 13.9% |
| HashiCorp Consul | 7.1% |
| Other | 79.0% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
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.
Multiple clouds and private datacenters with dynamic IPs, ephemeral containers, dominated by east-west traffic, no clear network perimeters.
CONSUL APPROACH
-Centralized registry to locate any service
-Services discovered and connected with centralized policies
-Network automated in service of applications
-Zero trust network enforced by identity-based security policies
We monitor all Service Mesh reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.