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HAProxy vs Kong Mesh comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

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)
Kong Mesh
Ranking in Service Mesh
3rd
Average Rating
6.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
1
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 Kong Mesh is 17.6%, up from 15.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Service Mesh Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HAProxy14.7%
Kong Mesh17.6%
Other67.7%
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.
Arjun Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a unique advantage by offering a global view for all workloads and clusters within the mesh but lack of a robust community for open-source support
There are a number of areas where Kong Kuma can improve. One is in terms of product delivery, such as Helm charts. There are a lot of gaps in the Helm charts currently. Another is in terms of the default monitoring and logging setup. It is not as production-ready as it could be. By default, Kuma comes with Loki, Yagger, and Prometheus to monitor the control plane and data plane, but the unified dashboarding and logging solution should be closer to production-grade. It is good for trying out the product, but I would not recommend taking it to production without setting up your own monitoring and logging solution. Additionally, Kuma recently released Fivecarless Mesh, which was built on top of Envoy. The challenge with this is that it adds overhead. If you want to run 100 containers in production, you will actually need to run 200 containers because you need to run one sidecar container per pod. Overall, I think Kong Kuma is a moderate product, but I would not personally recommend it for production use.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"It is scalable."
"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."
"Stability is number one."
"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."
"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"It is a scalable product."
 

Cons

"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs."
"Documentation could be improved."
"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source."
"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."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."
"The initial setup is complicated. Although Kuma has its own CLI, CTL, and they say to use their CLI, if I have to build a generic solution, my personal preference would be to use Helm or another similar solution other than Kuma. If you have your own library CLI, it becomes hard for others to adopt it. For example, if I have to write some automation, infrastructure automation, I can't just use Kuma. I have to change my code to use Kuma's CTL, which is unfair because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit with my current automation structure. I have to do something extra, something additional, which I really don't like."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
"The product is open source."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."
"The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."
"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."
"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."
"I have tried for my personal research and all those things. I have tried only the open-source version. So, for me, it was always free."
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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
24%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise15
No data available
 

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 Kong Mesh?
I have tried for my personal research and all those things. I have tried only the open-source version. So, for me, it was always free.
What needs improvement with Kong Mesh?
There are a number of areas where Kong Kuma can improve. One is in terms of product delivery, such as Helm charts. There are a lot of gaps in the Helm charts currently. Another is in terms of the d...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
Kuma
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
First AbuDhabi Bank, CISCO, Papa johns pizza, Samsung, Expedia
Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, HAProxy, Kong and others in Service Mesh. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.