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HAProxy vs Kong Mesh comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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)
Kong Mesh
Ranking in Service Mesh
4th
Average Rating
6.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 13.6%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kong Mesh is 19.9%, up from 10.8% 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.
Arjun Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a unique advantage by offering a global view for all workloads and clusters within the mesh but lack of a robust community for open-source support
There are a number of areas where Kong Kuma can improve. One is in terms of product delivery, such as Helm charts. There are a lot of gaps in the Helm charts currently. Another is in terms of the default monitoring and logging setup. It is not as production-ready as it could be. By default, Kuma comes with Loki, Yagger, and Prometheus to monitor the control plane and data plane, but the unified dashboarding and logging solution should be closer to production-grade. It is good for trying out the product, but I would not recommend taking it to production without setting up your own monitoring and logging solution. Additionally, Kuma recently released Fivecarless Mesh, which was built on top of Envoy. The challenge with this is that it adds overhead. If you want to run 100 containers in production, you will actually need to run 200 containers because you need to run one sidecar container per pod. Overall, I think Kong Kuma is a moderate product, but I would not personally recommend it for production use.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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."
"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"
"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."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions."
"Advanced traffic rules, including stick tables and ACLs, which allow me to shape traffic while it's load balanced."
"It is a scalable product."
 

Cons

"​It needs proper HTTP/2 support.​"
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"The configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer."
"The product does not have any new technologies."
"The visibility could be improved."
"They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers. Also, they need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration."
"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."
"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."
"The initial setup is complicated. Although Kuma has its own CLI, CTL, and they say to use their CLI, if I have to build a generic solution, my personal preference would be to use Helm or another similar solution other than Kuma. If you have your own library CLI, it becomes hard for others to adopt it. For example, if I have to write some automation, infrastructure automation, I can't just use Kuma. I have to change my code to use Kuma's CTL, which is unfair because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit with my current automation structure. I have to do something extra, something additional, which I really don't like."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."
"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."
"The tool is open-source."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"It is free of cost."
"The product is open source."
"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."
"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."
"I have tried for my personal research and all those things. I have tried only the open-source version. So, for me, it was always free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 Kong Mesh?
I have tried for my personal research and all those things. I have tried only the open-source version. So, for me, it was always free.
What needs improvement with Kong Mesh?
There are a number of areas where Kong Kuma can improve. One is in terms of product delivery, such as Helm charts. There are a lot of gaps in the Helm charts currently. Another is in terms of the d...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
Kuma
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
First AbuDhabi Bank, CISCO, Papa johns pizza, Samsung, Expedia
Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, Envoy, HAProxy and others in Service Mesh. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.