HAProxy Reviews

We are using HAProxy for load balancing.

The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source.

HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets.

I have been using HAProxy for approximately eight years.

HAProxy is stable.

The scalability of HAProxy is good.

We have approximately 10 servers utilizing this solution.

Our organization is an enterprise, but we are using HAProxy for the basic requirements and functions. We are using the basic requirements for load balancing. I would recommend this solution for small businesses. For large businesses, I would recommend Citrix and F5.

If we have any issues generally we open a ticket through the internet, and we receive a solution. They have been responsive.

The support could improve by providing better documentation. If they had an online knowledge base it would be helpful.

I rate the support from HAProxy a three out of five.

We used F5 in 2018 and it was a better solution than HAProxy, but it was expensive. In order to have the best features, you need to pay for a better solution, HAProxy is free.

The deployment and configuration of HAProxy are not easy if we compare it with other solutions, such as F5. The full implementation took us one to two months to complete.

I rate the initial setup of HAProxy a three out of five.

We did the implementation of HAProxy in-house.

We have one or two people who maintain HAProxy. They do the administration, testing, and all other maintenance. We did not require any third parties. The solution requires maintenance approximately three times annually. However, we are not using the solution extensively.

HAProxy is a free open-source solution.

The main difference between HAProxy and other solutions on the market is that it is open source. Otherwise, functional-wise, it's the same.

I rate HAProxy a seven out of ten.

We primarily use HAProxy for the load balancer. 

Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind. 

HAProxy has a lot of features, so what's most valuable depends on what we are loading. The forwarding proxy is a valuable feature. HAProxy is a valuable product. 

HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations. 

I have been using HAProxy for about 15 years. 

HAProxy is stable. 

HAProxy is scalable. We have some 2,500 end users using HAProxy. They are mostly developers. 

We did not use any other solution before we deployed HAProxy. 

The initial HAProxy setup was straightforward. The setup is automated, which makes it instantaneous. 

We deployed HAProxy in house. 

We did see a return on investment from HAProxy. On a scale of one to five, I would rate our ROI with a four. 

HAProxy is mostly open-source, so I cannot provide any pricing or licensing numbers. 

We did not evaluate any other options before landing on HAProxy. 

The advice I would give to others looking to implement HAProxy is to go with the on-prem version if you can. The cloud version is a bit different because a lot depends on HAProxy's compatibility with the cloud vendor itself. I would say to stick with the solution your cloud provider has put out.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and 10 being the best, I would give HAProxy a nine overall.

The main use cases are for load balancing and limiting traffic. It is utilized as a front-end server for balancing HTTP traffic, as well as for balancing traffic between application servers and database servers like Redis and Elasticsearch. HAProxy is employed for both HTTP and TCP load balancing purposes, ensuring optimal resource utilization and preventing overloading of any single server. 

When dealing with scenarios that require splitting or monitoring Redis clusters with external masters and two slaves, HAProxy becomes essential. This is because HAProxy can significantly reduce delays in Redis communication when switching roles between servers. This reduction in delay improves application load time and prevents unnecessary downtime during server switchovers. It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions.

There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration. Currently, dynamic changes are lost when reloading the service, and it would be beneficial if dynamic configuration changes could be applied without losing the configuration or reloading the service, ensuring backups and preserving the static configuration.

I have been using it for six years.

I would rate its stability capabilities nine out of ten.

It provides impressive scalability. I would rate it ten out of ten.

In a specific situation where a question was posted on a forum, the issue was successfully resolved within a day or the following day. I would rate their customer support services nine out of ten.

Positive

We worked with NGINX, but these two solutions are not entirely comparable as they serve different primary purposes. NGINX functions both as a web server and a reverse proxy server, while HAProxy is primarily a load-balancing proxy. They both have load-balancing capabilities, but their main focus and functionalities are distinct.

The initial setup can be challenging. I would rate it six out of ten.

For simpler cases, the deployment process can take around one hour. For more complex scenarios, it can extend up to one week. 

We are using HAProxy as an open-source.

NGINX is easier to configure and is well-suited for load balancing against an application server. However, HAProxy is more versatile and can be fine-tuned for various scenarios, particularly in load-balancing multiple application servers. In terms of deployment, HAProxy is easy to integrate into a green-blue deployment approach. It allows for simpler configuration and sending commands to its sockets.

Based on customer stability and varying use cases, I recommend choosing this solution. I would rate it nine out of ten.

We use it as a load balancer for our application servers, including Bonita, VPMN, our NAS reporting tools, and Telus solutions. We have two or four applications in the back end and use HAProxy as a load balancer.

Currently, we're just using it as a load balancer. We haven't explored all the functionality yet, but we find it has too much to offer.

There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper. 

We have been using HAProxy for a month. We are using the latest version.

We were using a big program, which caused issues when one of the servers went down. However, with the use of HAProxy, even if one of the nodes goes down, the request and reply can still be received, making it more stable.

It is a stable solution. 

It is scalable. We haven't experienced any major issues with scalability. We didn't need to apply any specific scheduling to the system. We have up to 1000 users in our company.

We were using Snap before. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It reached its end of life last month, in March. So we made some comparisons to find a replacement for Snap, and my team and I chose to use HAProxy. We just started using it. We paid the enterprise fee towards the end of last year.

The initial setup is fine. We just need to configure the solution. One good technical person is enough for the deployment. 

For the deployment process, we need to install Linux and follow the instructions provided on the site. It is deployed in the production. We did the collection online with the installation and checked out the bulk of the management before logging in and starting the application deployment. One of our team members took care of the installation.

There is a license model in place. It is accessible. 

I would definitely recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

The product is an open-source load balancer. We deploy it for our application as a front-end server where all the users come on that particular HAProxy server, and it is redirected to our back-end servers.

It helps include the reverse proxy or more security modules for enhancing security. It helps with enhancing web application security.

The solution is open-source. 

HAProxy can provide protocol-level load balancing. We can use the HTTP or HTTPS load balancing, including the PCP and UDP protocol level load balancing.

The setup is straightforward.

It is scalable.

The solution is stable. 

It's saved project costs and time. Since the deployment is very easy and the open-source functionality saves a huge amount of cost in terms of project deployment.

The product should have more security and dashboard functionality for monitoring so that any administrator can see the usability and track all the incoming and outgoing requests. It should have a better dashboard GUI, and more security models should be there. The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs. We need it to be more visible.

Documentation could be better.

I've used the solution for around four years. We started using it in 2018.

It's reliable and very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

It's a scalable product.

There are more than 2,000 users on the product right now. 

We already scaled up with the different sets, so we previously scaled this solution.

I did not solicit the help of any technical support. 

The documentation that's available on the HAProxy is okay. There is some room for improvement in that regard. 

Neutral

We previously used a traditional load balancer.

We used a TCP load balancer. The NGNIX, we use for the reverse proxy for HTTP and HTTPS protocol. However, for particular applications, we required TCP load balancer, so we used HAProxy there.

HAProxy provides the TCP and UDP port protocol-based load balancing, and NGINX is the reverse proxy, providing a great solution for web traffic, HTTP, and HTTPS.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not too complex. 

One single administrator can manage and deploy this product.

I handled the deployment of the product myself. 

We just replaced some of our OEM solutions with an open-source solution. We did not invest anything in that, we just save the money on some OEM products. We have to purchase some load balancers, however, we replaced this with the open-source option and they are performing well. Therefore, there is a return on investment in the sense that we replaced that traditional load balancer that we paid for.

We do not need to pay for the product as it is open-source. 

There's no additional cost. We can deploy and manage on our own, and community support is available in HAProxy.

We evaluated NGINX prior to using this product.

If you require a TCP and UDP protocol for load balancing, this is a very great solution.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

HAProxy has been our primary SSL termination technology in production. We use it for our own product, which is Qivos Cloud. It is a software service and we used HAProxy for high-traffic API gateways. These products load balance our servers.

We are using HAProxy, for secondary loads and use cases. There are times that our customers require specific static IP addresses versus AWS CloudFront, which uses IP pools. So when we have such environments, we use HAProxy for SSL termination and load balancing.

Stability is number one. We have never had problems with it. When configured correctly, it could run for years. We never had a task that we could not achieve with HAProxy.

The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added. Something that might help with syntax or common use cases.

We have been using HAProxy for more than five years.

HAProxy is very stable.

We had no problem with scalability both in terms of scaling HAProxy itself, or the backend behind it.

We only used it for public resources, like the manual, documentation, or stack overflow. We could find the solutions easily.

We replaced HAProxy with CloudFront because we switched to a serverless option. We did not have a problem with HAProxy. We re-architected our solutions. SSL termination and load balancing now happen in AWS CloudFront and application load balancer.

We deployed in-house. We learned how to use it. I would say less than a month. In the beginning, we only did specific things and over time we gained expertise and we expanded our users, but it was, more or less, a month to go with production.

HAProxy was very easy to script, but it had a learning curve back then. I am talking about four or five years ago. Once we gained our expertise on what we wanted to do with HAProxy, it was easier. We only used the open-source version of HAProxy for pricing.

HAProxy is something that we manage ourselves, so we cannot directly compare it with Amazon CloudFront. If we only focus on technology, it is the same features. The only reason we switched is because of management costs.

HAProxy is definitely a dependable choice. The only thing that needs some attention is the initial learning curve. When you get past that, it is a great tool to use. We are very happy with it. I would rate HA Proxy a nine out of ten.

We use the open source version in our dev environments, and the commercial product for production and pre-production. Our primary use case is for reverse proxy, especially for switches in the different environments. I am a system engineer. 

The solution is user-friendly, works quickly and efficiently. 

I'd like to see better documentation and preferably a French version as well. The product is used a lot here and that would be helpful.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

In my previous job we had some stability issues related to configuration and compatibility with other products. It was unstable because of cookie problems. 

We have good scalability. 

The initial setup takes a few minutes. We use Terraform to deploy and it's very fast. We have five users in the company. 

I had a look at Nginx for the reverse proxy part but I preferred the typology of the writing of HAProxy.

It's important to define your use case clearly so you can be sure the product corresponds to your needs.

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

I use it for managing Redis clusters where I have a front-end for a read-write and a front-end for a read-only. I have no idea who else in my company uses it. I had opted to use this because we have silos in our company. We have a network silo that does the load balancing, and I wanted to control how these tests worked with the load balancing. I wanted them to do load balancing where they hand off like a TCP Fast Open. They perform a check on these services with TCP Fast Open.

For example, there is one free HAProxy service for each node, and they use TCP Fast Open for things like that. It's flipped to the HAProxy, and then they establish a persistent connection. It's more of a hand-off, and then I can do all the magic. You can do most of the things I'm doing with HAProxy in F5 too. However, it's siloed off and takes a long time to get things done. I don't have any agility. I took that upon myself with HAProxy because it's a lot quicker to do it myself instead of waiting weeks for somebody else to do it.

The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something. 

The logging is pretty hard to understand, but the documentation for the logging is decent. That would be my only criticism. 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.

And there is some more functionality that I would like to see. For example, you'll do a TLS to the front leg— whatever connects to your load balancer. You do the HTBS or whatever TLS connection there. And then, on the back end, you usually have to clear it a lot of times. I want to be able to do TLS all the way through on both legs. I don't know if it can do that. HAProxy might be able to do this already, but I haven't done enough research to see if this is possible

Probably about two years now.

HAProxy is rock solid. I'm pleased with it.

HAProxy is scalable. It easily handles the current loads, but my connections are pretty low. It can take a lot more than what I'm doing. I'm making around 200 connections per second, which doesn't put much stress on the solution. HAProxy can handle it pretty easy.

I've never used any tech support. I just use the freeware.

The setup was pretty straightforward. When I started using HAProxy, I played around with it in a container and built from source, so I got a good feel for what it could do. And then I picked up a book called Load Balancing With HAProxy. After I read that, I felt confident I could use this service in a production setting. I was able to tune the knobs I needed to adjust and understand things pretty well. The book is pretty decent, but I wouldn't mind seeing a newer version of it. It was helpful. 

The HAProxy documentation on the web isn't bad, but the book is much nicer for me. I like to see how the authors apply HAProxy to specific use cases and leverage things. Also, they explain how to do something, whereas the documentation only tells you about the features and parameters. Sometimes it's hard for the documentation to show the importance of a feature and express how to do what you want. 

I'm using the freeware version. I have no idea if there is a paid solution because I've never looked into it. I might in the future if I have a use case for it. But right now, I'm leveraging the free version, and it seems to fit well in this stack because I'm using the free Redis.   

I would rate HAProxy nine out of 10. My biggest recommendation for any new HAProxy user is to read Load Balancing With HAProxy by Nick Ramirez. If you're thinking about using HAProxy and you want to get your feet wet, read this book and follow along with it. Determine whether you're trying to do an HAProxy for a web service or something else and concentrate specifically on those pieces. I read the whole book and enjoyed it, but you can focus on one thing if you need to. This book is short, and you can just read the whole thing to understand it.

We are just using this product in our UAT environment.

Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature.

It is a complete open-source product. The good thing is that there is a lot of customization and development.

There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment.

When you have to customize it for your application requirements, there are a lot of challenges. There should be more support for customization. To customize it better, there should be some kind of programming integration.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years.

It is completely open-source, so updates come very frequently. To the most extent, it is stable.

It is an open-source product, so you have to work on technical support. You can take premium support from HAProxy, and that helps a lot, but it is not comparable to other enterprise products because it is a free-of-cost product.

I also use F5. I am looking to replace F5 with HAProxy for some of my non-critical applications.

HAProxy is open source. So, if you have cost concerns, you can go for it. It is good for basic application load balancing. If you don't have budget limitations or you have critical applications, you should definitely go for F5 because of the standardization and the product experience they have in handling mission-critical applications. 

Its initial setup is easy and not very complex. If you have a general understanding of how containers and VMware work, it is not very problematic to deploy it.

The initial setup documentation of HAProxy is good, but when you have to customize it for your application requirements, it gets difficult.

It is free of cost.

We have currently deployed it for one product. For non-critical applications, it is a good choice. You can definitely go for it if you have cost concerns, your application is not very dynamic, or you are looking for a basic load balancing product. 

I would rate HAProxy a six out of 10.

The primary use case of HAProxy is for load balancing. 

This product is scalable and inexpensive. 

The visibility could be improved. Stability can falter when there is a lot of traffic. End-to-end connections are limited. 

Stability could be improved. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is good, it's provided to us by the distributor. 

Licensing costs are inexpensive. 

I rate this solution six out of 10.