Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs HAProxy comparison

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and HAProxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: October 2024).

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. HAProxy

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Categories and Ranking

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HAProxy

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Service Mesh (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is 1.4%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 12.9%, down from 13.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Mridu Boruah

Cloud manager at Baxter International Inc.

Aug 11, 2023

A tool that offers its users resiliency, high availability, and a great scalability

In my company, we use it to post, you know, a variety of business applications, like ERP, finance applications, and legal applications, which we post using EC2 instances The most valuable feature of the solution is its pay-as-you-go model. You don't pay when you shut down the instances. The…

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Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

Apr 17, 2024

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool integrates well with Amazon native services. Its valuable feature is integrations."

"The solution is very well integrated into Amazon's services."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is scaling."

"It has very good features. It is very configurable. Security with TLS, et cetera is also very easy."

"The feature that I like the most is the scalability. The solutions I build often have many pieces, which are very complicated. If a client comes to me with a design, my developer has made this as a template or a cloud formation script. It's a design on paper, and I want it executed a certain way. I can do that quickly and repeatedly with AWS. That is a considerable advantage because I can take that template and do it five times in different zones. That is an excellent feature based on a template, et cetera."

"It is a very scalable solution in which you can add more servers instantly."

"Amazon Elastic Load Balancing transfers the data securely from servers to users and splits the traffic based on peak times."

"We use the solution for internet-exposed websites and internal load-balancing purposes."

More Amazon Elastic Load Balancing pros

"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."

"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."

"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."

"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."

"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."

"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."

"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."

"I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime."

More HAProxy pros

Cons

"It would be good if we had a product that integrates well with third-party vendors. Some of our customers want a multi-cloud solution. They don't want to be tied up to or be in just one cloud."

"The product's stability is an area with a slight shortcoming, which can be improved."

"The reporting could be simplified so that the client sees a report of what they cached at the end of the month and the number of hits. It should have metrics above and beyond their Google analytics, etc. You can't do that with the solutions from AWS. You have to build sophisticated cloud trails, reports, dashboards, etc. The setup is significant, and it's hard to manage. You'll need to hire someone or pay a consultant on a regular basis to manage it, and it's not for the faint of heart."

"We faced some issues with the health check."

"They should improve the solution's pricing."

"The machines created by Amazon Elastic Load Balancing have different IP addresses, which we are not able to whitelist or predict."

"The tool could enhance the internal load balancer with better health monitoring. The external load balancer needs more security parameters to protect it from the internet, as it currently lacks protection. It's okay for basic load balancing and those looking for basic functionality in an application load balancer. However, if someone is going to onboard a critical application, like in the banking sector, I wouldn't suggest Amazon Elastic Load Balancer because of security issues. There are no firewall restrictions."

"The solution needs to guarantee stability because multiple loads behind a load balancer can cause service unavailability."

More Amazon Elastic Load Balancing cons

"The product does not have any new technologies."

"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."

"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."

"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."

"The solution can be improved by controlling TCP behavior better and mandating to clients what the expected outcome must be in order to avoid receiving contestant timeout logs."

"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."

"Improving the documentation with multiple examples and scenarios would be beneficial. Most users encounter similar situations, so having a variety of scenarios readily available on the tool's website would be helpful. For instance, if I were part of the HAProxy team, I'd create a webpage with different scenarios and provide files for each scenario. This way, users wouldn't have to start from scratch every time."

"Documentation could be improved."

More HAProxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."

"The solution's pricing is $30 per month."

"The solution's pricing is low and I rate it a nine out of ten."

"There is a yearly license."

"The licensing fees are based on the number of connections one uses. It is a free tool for a certain amount of connections, which runs into thousands, and after that, there is a certain amount to be paid to Amazon."

"I have no issues with the tool's pricing."

"The product is not cheap."

"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."

"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."

"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible."

"HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

60%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing transfers the data securely from servers to users and splits the traffic based on peak times.

What needs improvement with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?

The tool could enhance the internal load balancer with better health monitoring. The external load balancer needs more security parameters to protect it from the internet, as it currently lacks pro...

What is your primary use case for Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?

We use the solution for internet-exposed websites and internal load-balancing purposes.

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 HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

NetScaler vs Amazon Elastic Load Balancing

Comparisons

Compared 48% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Amazon Elastic Load Balancing

Compared 26% of the time

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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 16% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 14% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Traefik Enterprise vs HAProxy

Compared 2% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Product Reports

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Download Amazon Elastic Load Balancing product report

Download HAProxy product report

Also Known As

No data available

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Video not available

Overview

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers that all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make your applications fault tolerant.

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

HAProxy One: This is a next-gen end-to-end application delivery platform created to secure and streamline modern application architectures. It offers a complete suite of solutions, such as application delivery software, turnkey, and appliance services observed and administered through a central control plane. The product supplies application acceleration, CDN, DDoS, bot management, WAF capabilities, and load balancing.

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane: This product enables organizations to streamline workflows, arrange traffic routing and security protocols, enhance the speed of delivery, and scale out of the organization’s applications. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane offers an intuitive user interface to observe and control the complete product lineup and API for administering numerous fleets of HAProxy Enterprise servers, either in the cloud or on premises.

HAProxy Edge: This product offering is an application delivery network (ADN) that provides a broad array of turnkey application services with amazing scale and complete visibility. Services include application and content acceleration, advanced security, and load balancing.

HAProxy ALOHA Hardware or Virtual Load Balancer: This product is a virtual load balancer or plug-and-play hardware constructed upon HAProxy Enterprise that is designed to support proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7. It has a user-friendly GUI, simple deployment, and no limit on backend servers, making it a complete product for organizations desiring a reliable system to provide high-end load distribution for critical services.

HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller: This product is designed to facilitate smooth traffic flow into a Kubernetes cluster. It is able to automatically discover anomalies and changes in an organization's Kubernetes infrastructure and provide precise distribution of traffic to healthy pods, with no downtime caused by poor pod health or scaling changes. The product comes with an embedded WAF to optimize the security of an organization’s applications running in Kubernetes.

HAProxy Enterprise: This product is the enterprise-class edition of HAProxy offering a dynamic and sturdy code base with next-generation features, an enterprise suite of add-ons, professional services, and trusted support.
- Cluster-wide tracking and rate limiting
- Advanced DDoS and bot management
- Web application firewall
- Reliable expert support
- High performance modules
- Device detection and geolocation
- Real-time dashboard

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.

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. HAProxy