HAProxy vs Traefik Enterprise comparison

HAProxy and Traefik Labs are both solutions in the Service Mesh category. HAProxy is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.6, while Traefik Labs is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.0. HAProxy holds a 14.2% mindshare in SM, compared to Traefik Labs’s 8.6% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of HAProxy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Traefik Labs users who would recommend it.

HAProxy

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

1,174 Views
773 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Traefik Enterprise

Read 1 Traefik Enterprise review

856 Views
820 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

HAProxy

Traefik Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Traefik Enterprise based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, Envoy, HAProxy and others in Service Mesh.

To learn more, read our detailed Service Mesh Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

January 2025

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Helped 831,265 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd)

Traefik Enterprise

Ranking in Service Mesh

7th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

API Management (18th)

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 Traefik Enterprise is 8.6%, up from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Service Mesh

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

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.

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Anurag Bandyopadhyay

Product Development Engineer at Razorpay

Offers a good dashboard that provides a great overview to users

I would say that maybe along the same path that Traefik Enterprise is currently on, you have most of the things straight up in the UI that you can check even with minimal training. You can just use, understand, and debug things from the UI. There is still work to be done in the tool, which can ensure that anyone with just minimal know-how of the product doesn't have to really go into the terminal and see the status of routes, concierge routes, or whether certain things are up or not. One should be able to just check things straight up from the UI and get to know what kind of issues are there in the solution, and even though such a feature is already there in the tool, there is more work to be done in it. I would not particularly recommend any improvements when it comes to the security of traffic. I think the tool is pretty pluggable in terms of whatever security we want to put in our routes, even though it is just as a middleware or just as a supporting product for whatever we have in our services.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."

"The feature that I have found the most valuable is that it works for my use case of application load balancing. I'm using it for PeerSense, and it's easy enough for PeerSense."

"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."

"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."

"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."

"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."

"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."

"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."

More HAProxy pros

"The tool handles scalability pretty easily. Adding more instances of services and all are pretty intuitive to do using Traefik Enterprise."

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."

"The product does not have any new technologies."

"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."

"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."

"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."

"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."

"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."

"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."

More HAProxy cons

"One should be able to just check things straight up from the UI and get to know what kind of issues are there in the solution, and even though such a feature is already there in the tool, there is more work to be done in it."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is open source."

"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."

"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."

"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

"The tool is open-source."

"HAProxy is free in the initial offer. However, pricing can be improved."

"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"I would say that Traefik Enterprise is cheaper than the other alternatives in the market."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

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 ...

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What do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Traefik Enterprise?

One of the reasons why my company moved from Envoy, as well as the other in-house options, to Traefik Enterprise was because doing many things in-house was overkill. Traefik Enterprise was a relati...

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What needs improvement with Traefik Enterprise?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Traefik Enterprise?

At Razorpay, the tool is used as a reverse proxy, ingress controller, and CRD management. A year and a half ago, my company started to move from Traefik Enterprise v1.0 to Traefik Enterprise v2.0. ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 15% of the time

NGINX Plus vs HAProxy

Compared 14% of the time

NetScaler vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 12% of the time

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs HAProxy

Compared 1% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Apache APISIX vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 24% of the time

Envoy vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 23% of the time

Tyk vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 17% of the time

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure API Management vs Traefik Enterprise

Compared 3% of the time

More Traefik Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

January 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

API Management

December 2024

Download Traefik Enterprise product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

No data available

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HAProxy

Traefik Labs

Overview

HAProxy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the fastest and most popular and trusted software load balancer products in the marketplace today. Organizations are able to immediately deploy HAProxy solutions to enable websites and applications to optimize performance, security, and observability. HAProxy solutions are available to scale to any environment.

HAProxy is an open-source product and has a robust, active, reliable community. The solutions are continually tested and improved on by the community. HAProxy offers a dynamic design to support the most modern architectures, microservices, and deployment environments (appliances, containers, virtual, and cloud).

HAProxy utilizes a cloud-native protocol, which makes it a complete solution for cloud services such as Red Hat OpenShift, OVH, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more. It also can be used as the reference load balancer in OpenStack.

HAProxy Products

HAProxy One: This is a next-gen end-to-end application delivery platform created to secure and streamline modern application architectures. It offers a complete suite of solutions, such as application delivery software, turnkey, and appliance services observed and administered through a central control plane. The product supplies application acceleration, CDN, DDoS, bot management, WAF capabilities, and load balancing.

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane: This product enables organizations to streamline workflows, arrange traffic routing and security protocols, enhance the speed of delivery, and scale out of the organization’s applications. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane offers an intuitive user interface to observe and control the complete product lineup and API for administering numerous fleets of HAProxy Enterprise servers, either in the cloud or on premises.

HAProxy Edge: This product offering is an application delivery network (ADN) that provides a broad array of turnkey application services with amazing scale and complete visibility. Services include application and content acceleration, advanced security, and load balancing.

HAProxy ALOHA Hardware or Virtual Load Balancer: This product is a virtual load balancer or plug-and-play hardware constructed upon HAProxy Enterprise that is designed to support proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7. It has a user-friendly GUI, simple deployment, and no limit on backend servers, making it a complete product for organizations desiring a reliable system to provide high-end load distribution for critical services.

HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller: This product is designed to facilitate smooth traffic flow into a Kubernetes cluster. It is able to automatically discover anomalies and changes in an organization's Kubernetes infrastructure and provide precise distribution of traffic to healthy pods, with no downtime caused by poor pod health or scaling changes. The product comes with an embedded WAF to optimize the security of an organization’s applications running in Kubernetes.

HAProxy Enterprise: This product is the enterprise-class edition of HAProxy offering a dynamic and sturdy code base with next-generation features, an enterprise suite of add-ons, professional services, and trusted support.
- Cluster-wide tracking and rate limiting
- Advanced DDoS and bot management
- Web application firewall
- Reliable expert support
- High performance modules
- Device detection and geolocation
- Real-time dashboard

Reviews from Real Users

“Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind.” - Nathanel S., Platform Architect at SES

“I use HAProxy for individuals who can not buy low balancers. I built NFV in a box and send individuals a pathway into an HAProxy VM. The setup was not difficult; it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC. When it comes to pricing, HAProxy is free.” - Nasir O., Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.

Traefik Enterprise is a powerful tool for managing microservices and reverse proxy needs, offering load balancing, dynamic configurations, and comprehensive ingress controller capabilities.

Traefik Enterprise stands out for its integration with Kubernetes, robust API management, and security features like TLS termination and authentication. Its flexibility and scalability make it suitable for handling large-scale traffic efficiently. Users particularly value its ease of deployment, automatic service discovery, and dynamic configuration capabilities. The integrated dashboard provides detailed metrics for monitoring traffic, ensuring performance and reliability. However, some users find the documentation insufficient and the initial setup challenging. Performance issues under heavy load and difficulties with backend system integrations are also noted concerns.

What are the key features of Traefik Enterprise?

Ease of Deployment: Simplifies the installation and configuration process.
Dynamic Configuration: Supports real-time updates without restarts.
Automatic Service Discovery: Automatically detects new services and integrates them.
Load Balancing: Distributes traffic evenly across services.
Security Integration: Features like TLS termination and Let's Encrypt integration to enhance security.
Comprehensive Dashboard: Detailed metrics and intuitive interface for traffic monitoring.
Kubernetes and Docker Support: Seamlessly integrates with modern application stacks.

What benefits should users look for in the reviews?

Scalability: Ability to handle large-scale traffic efficiently.
Enhanced Security: Advanced security features for protecting data and services.
Real-time Monitoring: Detailed and intuitive dashboard for comprehensive traffic monitoring.
Ease of Integration: Smooth integration with Kubernetes and Docker environments.
Service Reliability: Effective load balancing and automatic service discovery.

In industries like e-commerce, finance, and technology, Traefik Enterprise is used to manage heavy traffic loads and ensure secure API management. Its capability to integrate with Kubernetes and Docker makes it a preferred choice for companies leveraging modern tech stacks. While some may find the initial setup challenging, the benefits in scalability, security, and monitoring often outweigh the drawbacks. For these sectors, the enhanced traffic management and robust security features are critical.

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp

Information Not Available

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, Envoy, HAProxy and others in Service Mesh. Updated: January 2025.

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