

Kemp LoadMaster and HAProxy compete in the load balancing market with Kemp LoadMaster having the upper hand in user satisfaction due to its ease of use and support, while HAProxy excels with its scalability and flexibility.
Features: Kemp LoadMaster offers simplified deployment with configuration templates, support for Microsoft applications like Exchange and SharePoint, and integration with Azure. It supports an Edge Security Pack, which differentiates between critical infrastructure and the public internet. HAProxy is valued for its customization abilities, supporting both TCP and HTTP load balancing. Its strong features include SSL termination, flexible health checks, and active monitoring for high availability.
Room for Improvement: Kemp LoadMaster could enhance its web interface and logging systems, adding more customizable options and advanced analytics. HAProxy would benefit from a more intuitive configuration interface, better integration with modern cloud ecosystems, improved documentation, and enhanced logging capabilities.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Kemp LoadMaster is praised for straightforward deployment, especially in on-premises environments, with commendable customer service noted for responsiveness and expertise. HAProxy, being open-source, involves a steeper learning curve and lacks formal customer service, relying on community support instead.
Pricing and ROI: Kemp LoadMaster offers competitive pricing with clear licensing options, praised for delivering substantial ROI through cost-effective features and strong support. HAProxy's open-source version provides an economic advantage but enterprise features may incur additional costs. Both solutions offer significant value, with Kemp frequently highlighted for achieving high ROI due to enhanced security and operational efficiency.
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 have not received technical support from Kemp LoadMaster without a license.
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.
Kemp LoadMaster is a scalable solution.
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.
With the license purchase afterwards, if it expires, it begins dropping the HTTP traffic, also the DNS traffic.
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.
After that, they said if it was good, we could purchase the license, and while we found it very good, the license cost was too high.
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 had some issues in patching management, so we deployed this product for virtual patching, the IPS rule, and it gives us very good results because we have very critical servers.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| HAProxy | 9.9% |
| Kemp LoadMaster | 6.7% |
| Other | 83.4% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 24 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 13 |
| 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.
Kemp LoadMaster is a powerful load balancing solution that also serves as a web application firewall. Its primary use case is load balancing and application load balancing, making it an ideal solution for organizations that must distribute traffic across multiple servers. Kemp's integration with an active directory for ESP usage, hosting/deployment of SSL certificates, and pricing are some of its most valuable features.
Using Kemp has helped organizations mitigate cross-scripting vulnerabilities, cookie-related issues, and content security policy issues. It has also allowed them to handle everything with Kemp instead of working on each application individually.
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