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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
7.1
HAProxy's open-source load balancer cuts costs, boosts efficiency, improves uptime, reduces staffing, and enhances scalability for users.
Sentiment score
4.4
Istio improved connectivity, security, and monitoring, reducing downtime and operational overhead while enhancing reliability, deployment speed, and cost savings.
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.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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%.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
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.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
Using Istio in a banking environment provides excellent value by ensuring secure microservice communication and minimizing performance issues through traceability and other observability features.
Infra , DevSecOps & Automation Architect at Zuellig Pharma
At first, I didn't see significant savings, but in the end, I realized that I didn't need as many tools since Istio already contains many aspects and features, which saved me a lot of time and probably money.
Sr. Solution Architect at Civatech Solutions
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.5
HAProxy's customer service and technical support are highly rated for quick, expert assistance, though documentation could improve.
Sentiment score
3.5
Istio's support is community-driven with extensive resources, independent issue management, and optional paid support; engineer expertise is praised.
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.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
Responses are often received within 24 hours, which is fair given the free nature of the service.
DevOps and Solution Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
HAProxy efficiently handles scalability, easily adapting configurations for growing traffic, ideal for small to medium businesses and larger environments.
Sentiment score
7.5
Istio excels in scalability with autoscaling and load balancing, rated highly by users, though large environments may require improvement.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance.
Infra , DevSecOps & Automation Architect at Zuellig Pharma
I use AWS EKS with a cluster autoscaler, enabling automatic scaling based on load.
DevOps and Solution Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
HAProxy is reliable, handles heavy traffic efficiently, with minimal downtime, quick support, and frequent updates enhancing stability and performance.
Sentiment score
6.1
Istio is reliable and stable for moderate traffic, earning high ratings despite occasional bugs and configuration challenges.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
Co-Founder, CEO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
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.
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
The architecture, configuration, and resource management can impact stability.
Infra , DevSecOps & Automation Architect at Zuellig Pharma
I rate the stability of Istio as an eight or nine out of ten.
DevOps and Solution Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees
Istio has been stable in my experience.
Sr. Solution Architect at Civatech Solutions
 

Room For Improvement

HAProxy needs a revamped GUI, improved APIs, better AWS integration, real-time config, enhanced docs, and stronger monitoring and security.
Istio's complexity, scalability, and support challenges hinder usability, especially with new developments like Ambient Mesh and proxyless changes.
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.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise support, to quickly resolve issues that might affect production.
DevOps and Solution Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees
Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
Infra , DevSecOps & Automation Architect at Zuellig Pharma
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users value HAProxy's competitive pricing and cost-effective licensing, especially compared to F5 and Citrix, despite initial setup costs.
Istio attracts enterprises with its open-source model, reducing costs by focusing expenses on necessary infrastructure and integrations.
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.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
Integration with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch incurs additional costs.
Infra , DevSecOps & Automation Architect at Zuellig Pharma
 

Valuable Features

Users praise HAProxy for reliable load balancing, customization, low latency, open-source benefits, and advanced features like secure traffic management.
Istio offers load balancing, security, and monitoring features ideal for enterprise projects with easy integration and comprehensive documentation.
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.
Junior System Administrator & DevOps at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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.
Principal Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
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.
Co-Founder, CEO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Istio provides excellent documentation and support, allowing for easy troubleshooting.
DevOps and Solution Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees
The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable.
Infra , DevSecOps & Automation Architect at Zuellig Pharma
 

Categories and Ranking

HAProxy
Ranking in Service Mesh
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (7th)
Istio
Ranking in Service Mesh
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 13.9%, up from 13.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Istio is 17.0%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Service Mesh Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Istio17.0%
HAProxy13.9%
Other69.1%
Service Mesh
 

Featured Reviews

Shrinivas Devarkonda - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
Handles high traffic efficiently and simplifies complex routing with rule-based logic
I think HAProxy is good as it stands now, but I believe there could be improvements. gRPC has recently been implemented, which is great, along with TLS 1.2 and 1.3 support, and HTTP 2.0 is also available. However, I'm unsure about the benchmark of those HTTP 2.0 requests on HAProxy. If there were any other protocol with better performance than HTTP 2.0, or perhaps mTLS and other similar features, including that in HAProxy would be really great. For improvements, I think that during setup and configuration, the steps provided are neat and clear. Anyone can easily install and configure it. There are many kernel tuning parameters also available, which is great. For specific improvement, in terms of logging, I think printing the full object of the request may help, or if there's a way to reference two requests, it would be beneficial to find a complete session history from a logged-in customer, as it would help analyze customer and user analytics.
Redentor Del Rosario - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Solution Architect at Civatech Solutions
Leverage cloud security monitoring across multiple providers with robust integration
The best features Istio offers in my experience stand out because my job requires me to look for and use this type of tool, and this fits what I'm looking for, not just because it's free, not just because of the monitoring side, but simply because a lot of what pertains to my project is useful for Istio. One of the good things about the features is that due to the nature of the tool, it is really good for enterprise projects, and it can be helpful for every company. Istio has positively impacted my organization by helping our architecture design and development, and we use this as a mesh, applying it for every single application and using those components, which is helping our company and our clients to do many different aspects for all the use of Istio.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
 

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 HAProxy?
Since we used the open-source version, we were not concerned about pricing, setup cost, or licensing.
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?
The positive changes include improvements in efficiency, and while I think the free aspect is good, it's crucial to be aware that sometimes cost will give you a good way for your needs, meaning it ...
 

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: December 2025.
879,853 professionals have used our research since 2012.