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HAProxy vs Istio comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 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
7.9
Companies favor HAProxy for cost-effective traffic management, saving on load balancers, and retaining customers annually with positive ROI.
Sentiment score
4.4
Istio improved connectivity, security, and monitoring, reducing downtime and operational overhead while enhancing reliability, deployment speed, and cost savings.
Improved uptime stands out, with our uptime statistics rising from around 98% to consistently above 99.900, meaning reduced SLA penalties while keeping our clients happier.
At first, I didn't see significant savings, but in the end, I realized that I didn't need as many tools since Istio already contains many aspects and features, which saved me a lot of time and probably money.
Using Istio in a banking environment provides excellent value by ensuring secure microservice communication and minimizing performance issues through traceability and other observability features.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
HAProxy's customer service has mixed reviews with suggestions for better documentation, though premium support is appreciated but inconsistent.
Sentiment score
3.5
Istio's support is community-driven with extensive resources, independent issue management, and optional paid support; engineer expertise is praised.
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.
Responses are often received within 24 hours, which is fair given the free nature of the service.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
HAProxy scales efficiently, supporting diverse loads and thousands of users, adaptable for both small and large business needs.
Sentiment score
7.5
Istio excels in scalability with autoscaling and load balancing, rated highly by users, though large environments may require improvement.
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance.
I use AWS EKS with a cluster autoscaler, enabling automatic scaling based on load.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
HAProxy is highly rated for stability and reliability, though some users occasionally face configuration and compatibility challenges.
Sentiment score
6.1
Istio is reliable and stable for moderate traffic, earning high ratings despite occasional bugs and configuration challenges.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
Proper allocation of resources and configuring CPU and memory are essential to ensure stability.
I rate the stability of Istio as an eight or nine out of ten.
Istio has been stable in my experience.
 

Room For Improvement

HAProxy needs better pricing, monitoring, documentation, dashboard functionality, performance stability, and enhanced GUI and TCP session control.
Istio's complexity, scalability, and support challenges hinder usability, especially with new developments like Ambient Mesh and proxyless changes.
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.
It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise support, to quickly resolve issues that might affect production.
Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
 

Setup Cost

HAProxy is free open-source software offering economic benefits, easy setup, and optional affordable extended features for integrated solutions.
Istio attracts enterprises with its open-source model, reducing costs by focusing expenses on necessary infrastructure and integrations.
In summary, using the open-source version incurs low financial costs but requires an upfront effort to set up, resulting in an overall cost-effective experience.
Integration with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch incurs additional costs.
 

Valuable Features

HAProxy offers load balancing, security, customization, scalability, open-source benefits, and efficient traffic management with user-friendly setup and cost savings.
Istio offers load balancing, security, and monitoring features ideal for enterprise projects with easy integration and comprehensive documentation.
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.
Istio provides excellent documentation and support, allowing for easy troubleshooting.
The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable.
 

Categories and Ranking

HAProxy
Ranking in Service Mesh
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (19th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (24th), Bot Management (12th)
Istio
Ranking in Service Mesh
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 14.7%, up from 13.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Istio is 19.0%, down from 21.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Service Mesh Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Istio19.0%
HAProxy14.7%
Other66.3%
Service Mesh
 

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks
What I like best about the product is its simplicity and speed. When you need to set up a load balancer quickly, HAProxy offers options like sticky sessions and round-robin. It's also fast to configure, including adding SSL for security. While it may have fewer options than other solutions like F5, HAProxy gets the job done for basic load-balancing tasks. The reliability features of HAProxy were particularly useful in a scenario where I needed to test load balancing between two Tomcats. Since these domains were inaccessible, I set up a third Docker with HAProxy, which had access to the Tomcat domains. I then configured HAProxy to handle the load balancing. This setup allowed the client to interact with HAProxy. The solution's integration with other elements is easy.
JETTI DINESH REDDY - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced microservice security and advanced traffic management and good authentification
When our developers are building the microservices, instead of imposing additional burdens or additional thinking on them, especially as part of network features such as traffic management, security, or observability, we deploy something from the infrastructure side, so developers need only focus…
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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 Istio?
Istio provides a significant saving for us in terms of costs since it is open source. However, Istio can still come at a price. It has a steep learning curve and might require more manpower hours ...
What do you like most about Istio?
We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.
What needs improvement with Istio?
The positive changes include improvements in efficiency, and while I think the free aspect is good, it's crucial to be aware that sometimes cost will give you a good way for your needs, meaning it ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about HAProxy vs. Istio and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.