HAProxy vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

HAProxy and VMware are both solutions in the Service Mesh category. HAProxy is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.6, while VMware is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.5. HAProxy holds a 14.0% mindshare in SM, compared to VMware’s 2.5% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of HAProxy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of VMware users who would recommend it.

HAProxy

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

7,548 Views
1,434 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

VMware Tanzu Platform

Read 22 VMware Tanzu Platform reviews

7,803 Views
390 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

HAProxy

VMware Tanzu Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

HAProxy and VMware Tanzu Platform offer robust solutions for load balancing and application modernization. VMware Tanzu Platform has the upper hand with its comprehensive features and strong customer support, while HAProxy is preferred for its pricing and support.

Features: HAProxy users find reliability, high performance, and wide protocol support valuable. VMware Tanzu Platform users value comprehensive container orchestration, advanced security, and integrated DevOps tools.

Room for Improvement: HAProxy users suggest enhancing GUI functionalities, better documentation for complex setups, and streamlined configuration. VMware Tanzu Platform users seek improvements in simplifying configuration processes, better integration capabilities, and more user-friendly interfaces.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HAProxy is straightforward to deploy but has mixed customer support experiences. VMware Tanzu Platform has a similarly appreciated deployment process and exceptional customer support.

Pricing and ROI: HAProxy is commended for low setup cost and steady ROI. VMware Tanzu Platform users report higher setup costs but acknowledge satisfactory ROI due to its comprehensive feature set.

To learn more, read our detailed HAProxy vs. VMware Tanzu Platform Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

July 2025

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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

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th)

VMware Tanzu Platform

Ranking in Service Mesh

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (13th), PaaS Clouds (13th), Cloud Management (25th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (3rd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 14.0%, up from 11.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 2.5%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Service Mesh

Featured Reviews

Kaushlendra Singh

Manager - IT Infrastructure and Network at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Used for load balancing, but its dashboard and reporting could be improved

We use the solution for load balancing The solution's implementation and troubleshooting are not easy. The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved. I have been using HAProxy for 12 years. We didn’t face any issues with the solution’s stability. I rate the solution’s stability an…

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DarshanChaudhari

Solutions Architect Hybrid Cloud Practice US/Europe at Tech Mahindra Limited

Empowers seamless connectivity and integration through APIs while offering robust auto-scaling

I am involved in IT services and we provide a solution to customers. We work with VMware, Nutanix, OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible. It offers native services for autoscaling and integrations through APIs, allowing seamless…

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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

"Scalable and inexpensive."

"The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB-algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none."

"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."

"Advanced traffic rules, including stick tables and ACLs, which allow me to shape traffic while it's load balanced."

"It is scalable."

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

"The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice."

"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."

More HAProxy pros

"The most valuable feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is the management functionality of the cluster life cycle. Additionally, the solution integrates well with other vendors, such as Velero for backups and Sonobuoy for compliance. Additionally, it works well in multi-cluster environments."

"I have multiple Kubernetes environments within my environment. TMC gives me a single pane view, which is good for managing everything."

"The most important thing about the solution is its flexibility."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The multi-tenancy with the VCD is great."

"We feel very good about these features."

"A feature we find valuable is that other products can also be integrated with Mission Control. This means that we can see the status of specific clusters, as well as view the monitoring application logs all from one point."

"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pros

Cons

"HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets."

"Documentation could be improved."

"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."

"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."

"There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment."

"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 product does not have any new technologies."

"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."

More HAProxy cons

"Having a unified dashboard to manage all infrastructure, whether it involves additional IT infrastructure or modern apps, would be highly advantageous"

"I would like to see additional support for things outside of Cloud Foundry."

"The disaster recovery feature could be improved to provide better tracking of issues. I would also like to see the introduction of a dashboard view, for even further integration of all the areas that Mission Control looks at."

"The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)"

"The solution is currently focused on VMware infrastructure and I would like to see more options made available."

"The solution could improve by having better integration with other solutions such as HPE."

"VMware Tanzu Service Mesh could add better integration with other cloud platforms, such as vRealize Automation or VMware vCloud Director for cloud providers."

"Tanzu could provide more granular control over whatever networking is being done on the containers. I would also like to see a slightly more detailed view of application-level tracing. I'm referring to the connections between different microservices. If they added a service-matching feature, that would be helpful for the customers to build or be more effective."

More VMware Tanzu Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."

"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."

"HAProxy is free open-source software."

"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."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."

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

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"Its pricing is very competitive. We get around 70% or 75%, sometimes even 80%, discount on the product. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."

"The solution is only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."

"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."

"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"

"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."

"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."

"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."

"The licensing cost is expensive."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

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 ...

See all answers

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

Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...

See all answers

What do you like most about VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

It definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native ap...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution. I would rate the pricing of VMware Tanzu Mission Control as four out of ten.

See all answers

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs HAProxy

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Rancher Labs vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 15% of the time

Kubernetes vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 14% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware Tanzu Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

July 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Tanzu Platform

July 2025

Download VMware Tanzu Platform product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu

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.

HAProxy

VMware Tanzu Platform is designed for cloud-native development and management of Kubernetes, CI/CD processes, microservices, and containerized workloads. It supports deployments both on cloud and on-premises, providing centralized management via Mission Control.

VMware Tanzu Platform offers seamless integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN, supporting centralized cluster management and lifecycle management. The platform provides a GUI for monitoring CI/CD pipelines and network policies, enhancing multi-tenancy and Day 2 operations. Users can easily manage Kubernetes clusters, monitor applications, and integrate with tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Cloud Foundry, and Azure. It ensures compliance and security for service providers, financial institutions, and businesses.

What are the key features of VMware Tanzu Platform?

Integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN: Enhances compatibility and flexibility.
Seamless Cluster Management: Centralized control over Kubernetes clusters.
CI/CD Pipelines and Network Policies: Simplifies monitoring and management.
Multi-tenancy Support: Facilitates resource sharing among multiple users.
Comprehensive Lifecycle Management: Streamlines deployment and scalability.
Observability Platform: Provides enhanced visibility and control.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in VMware Tanzu Platform reviews?

Centralized Management: Simplifies operations and reduces manual effort.
Enhanced Compliance and Security: Meets regulatory requirements.
Flexibility in Deployment: Supports both cloud and on-premises options.
Seamless Integration: Works with multiple vendors and tools.
Developer-Friendly Environment: Improves productivity and innovation.

Industries such as financial institutions, service providers, and businesses requiring rigorous compliance and security deploy VMware Tanzu Platform. These entities benefit from centralized management, streamlined DevOps processes, and integrated tools, enhancing their capabilities in cloud-native developments and containerized workloads.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

July 2025

Free Report: HAProxy vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

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