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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:
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.8
HAProxy's customer service has mixed reviews with suggestions for better documentation, though premium support is appreciated but inconsistent.
No sentiment score available
Users manage issues via self-help and forums; direct engagement provides expert support, with abundant online documentation available.
 

Room For Improvement

Sentiment score
3.5
HAProxy needs better pricing, monitoring, documentation, dashboard functionality, performance stability, and enhanced GUI and TCP session control.
Sentiment score
7.5
Istio faces challenges with setup complexity, performance, and support, highlighting the need for improved documentation and user-friendly features.
Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
 

Scalability Issues

No sentiment score available
HAProxy scales efficiently, supporting diverse loads and thousands of users, adaptable for both small and large business needs.
No sentiment score available
Istio is highly rated for scalability with Kubernetes, offering automation and control plane improvements, yet some performance challenges remain.
Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance.
 

Setup Cost

No sentiment score available
HAProxy is free open-source software offering economic benefits, easy setup, and optional affordable extended features for integrated solutions.
No sentiment score available
Istio provides cost-effective open-source deployment, although infrastructure and integration with observability tools may incur additional expenses.
Integration with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch incurs additional costs.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
HAProxy is highly rated for stability and reliability, though some users occasionally face configuration and compatibility challenges.
Sentiment score
8.0
Istio is generally stable and reliable under moderate traffic, but proper setup is vital to avoid misconfigurations and bugs.
The architecture, configuration, and resource management can impact stability.
 

Valuable Features

Sentiment score
7.5
HAProxy offers load balancing, security, customization, scalability, open-source benefits, and efficient traffic management with user-friendly setup and cost savings.
No sentiment score available
Istio enhances observability, security, and management through load balancing, traffic routing, monitoring tools, and flexible integration capabilities.
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
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th)
Istio
Ranking in Service Mesh
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 14.6%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Istio is 21.9%, down from 22.8% 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
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
 

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?
There's a new product being worked on, with contributions from the team at Solo.io, called Ambient Mesh. This is being built into the open-source project. The purpose of Ambient Mesh was to make it...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
No data available
 

Learn More

Video not available
Video not 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: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.