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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:
 

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
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 14.2%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Istio is 23.0%, up from 21.9% 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…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 features I find valuable in this solution are session control which automatically disconnects users that forget to log off, and the ability to write rules to either allow or block certain file requests."
"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 ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."
"It solves a problem for me where I can build files, not based on the health of the check, but rather the speed of the check."
"The solution is user-friendly and efficient."
"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."
"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."
"We can implement load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple service instances. Istio also offers traffic routing capabilities and circuit-breaking functionality. For security, it handles authentication using mutual TLS (mTLS) between services. It can authorize services using JWT tokens. Istio also allows defining policies for rate limiting to control traffic within services."
"Istio provides tremendous value, particularly in offering TLS and authentication over microservice-to-microservice communication."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."
"The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable."
"Istio makes all that much easier - traffic splits, percentage traffic splits, doing some sort of chaos testing to see how it works."
 

Cons

"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is."
"While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source."
"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"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."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"Istio has issues with performance."
"Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
"If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning."
"Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"Based on my experience, the solution could be improved. They could simplify the learning process so that users can understand how its features work together, especially with components like Kibana. Learning about the different components is necessary. For instance, you need to understand the traffic flow, potential bottlenecks, and the architecture within Istio."
"I've seen applications where they had such strict time constraints, they couldn't use Istio because it was too much overhead."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."
"HAProxy is free open-source software."
"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."
"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."
"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."
"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."
"We use the tool's open-source version, so there are no hidden fees or additional costs associated with it."
"It is on the less expensive side. It provides a significant saving for us in terms of cost and other things. It is open-source. We just download it from the open-source framework and use it."
"You can deploy Istio free of cost and don't need to pay for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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?
At the moment, there are no immediate improvements needed. Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

Learn More

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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: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.