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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
7.8
Companies favor HAProxy for cost-effective traffic management, saving on load balancers, and retaining customers annually with positive ROI.
Sentiment score
7.8
Istio improved connectivity, security, and monitoring, reducing downtime and operational overhead while enhancing reliability, deployment speed, and cost savings.
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
7.3
HAProxy's customer service has mixed reviews with suggestions for better documentation, though premium support is appreciated but inconsistent.
Sentiment score
6.0
Istio's customer assistance receives mixed feedback, with challenges during setup but community and paid support options praised.
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
8.6
Istio excels in scalability and integration with Kubernetes, efficiently managing high traffic and automating processes for large environments.
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
7.8
Istio offers reliable stability for high-traffic environments with configuration being the primary challenge, achieving high user satisfaction ratings.
The architecture, configuration, and resource management can impact stability.
I rate the stability of Istio as an eight or nine out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

HAProxy needs better pricing, monitoring, documentation, dashboard functionality, performance stability, and enhanced GUI and TCP session control.
Istio faces challenges in documentation, setup complexity, scalability, and compatibility, impacting adoption and efficient performance in Kubernetes environments.
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.
Enterprise users value Istio's cost-effectiveness and no licensing fees, despite potential infrastructure and integration costs.
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 enhances security and monitoring with load balancing, traffic management, and tools for authentication, tracing, and advanced routing.
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
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd)
Istio
Ranking in Service Mesh
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 13.6%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Istio is 22.9%, up from 22.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
I do not see much room for improvement in Istio for my project as it currently fits my needs perfectly. It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise sup...
 

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: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.