HAProxy Reviews

We use the open source version in our dev environments, and the commercial product for production and pre-production. Our primary use case is for reverse proxy, especially for switches in the different environments. I am a system engineer. 

The solution is user-friendly, works quickly and efficiently. 

I'd like to see better documentation and preferably a French version as well. The product is used a lot here and that would be helpful.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

In my previous job we had some stability issues related to configuration and compatibility with other products. It was unstable because of cookie problems. 

We have good scalability. 

The initial setup takes a few minutes. We use Terraform to deploy and it's very fast. We have five users in the company. 

I had a look at Nginx for the reverse proxy part but I preferred the typology of the writing of HAProxy.

It's important to define your use case clearly so you can be sure the product corresponds to your needs.

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

I use it for managing Redis clusters where I have a front-end for a read-write and a front-end for a read-only. I have no idea who else in my company uses it. I had opted to use this because we have silos in our company. We have a network silo that does the load balancing, and I wanted to control how these tests worked with the load balancing. I wanted them to do load balancing where they hand off like a TCP Fast Open. They perform a check on these services with TCP Fast Open.

For example, there is one free HAProxy service for each node, and they use TCP Fast Open for things like that. It's flipped to the HAProxy, and then they establish a persistent connection. It's more of a hand-off, and then I can do all the magic. You can do most of the things I'm doing with HAProxy in F5 too. However, it's siloed off and takes a long time to get things done. I don't have any agility. I took that upon myself with HAProxy because it's a lot quicker to do it myself instead of waiting weeks for somebody else to do it.

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 logging is pretty hard to understand, but the documentation for the logging is decent. That would be my only criticism. Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading.

And there is some more functionality that I would like to see. For example, you'll do a TLS to the front leg— whatever connects to your load balancer. You do the HTBS or whatever TLS connection there. And then, on the back end, you usually have to clear it a lot of times. I want to be able to do TLS all the way through on both legs. I don't know if it can do that. HAProxy might be able to do this already, but I haven't done enough research to see if this is possible

Probably about two years now.

HAProxy is rock solid. I'm pleased with it.

HAProxy is scalable. It easily handles the current loads, but my connections are pretty low. It can take a lot more than what I'm doing. I'm making around 200 connections per second, which doesn't put much stress on the solution. HAProxy can handle it pretty easy.

I've never used any tech support. I just use the freeware.

The setup was pretty straightforward. When I started using HAProxy, I played around with it in a container and built from source, so I got a good feel for what it could do. And then I picked up a book called Load Balancing With HAProxy. After I read that, I felt confident I could use this service in a production setting. I was able to tune the knobs I needed to adjust and understand things pretty well. The book is pretty decent, but I wouldn't mind seeing a newer version of it. It was helpful. 

The HAProxy documentation on the web isn't bad, but the book is much nicer for me. I like to see how the authors apply HAProxy to specific use cases and leverage things. Also, they explain how to do something, whereas the documentation only tells you about the features and parameters. Sometimes it's hard for the documentation to show the importance of a feature and express how to do what you want. 

I'm using the freeware version. I have no idea if there is a paid solution because I've never looked into it. I might in the future if I have a use case for it. But right now, I'm leveraging the free version, and it seems to fit well in this stack because I'm using the free Redis.   

I would rate HAProxy nine out of 10. My biggest recommendation for any new HAProxy user is to read Load Balancing With HAProxy by Nick Ramirez. If you're thinking about using HAProxy and you want to get your feet wet, read this book and follow along with it. Determine whether you're trying to do an HAProxy for a web service or something else and concentrate specifically on those pieces. I read the whole book and enjoyed it, but you can focus on one thing if you need to. This book is short, and you can just read the whole thing to understand it.

We are just using this product in our UAT environment.

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

It is a complete open-source product. The good thing is that there is a lot of customization and development.

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.

When you have to customize it for your application requirements, there are a lot of challenges. There should be more support for customization. To customize it better, there should be some kind of programming integration.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years.

It is completely open-source, so updates come very frequently. To the most extent, it is stable.

It is an open-source product, so you have to work on technical support. You can take premium support from HAProxy, and that helps a lot, but it is not comparable to other enterprise products because it is a free-of-cost product.

I also use F5. I am looking to replace F5 with HAProxy for some of my non-critical applications.

HAProxy is open source. So, if you have cost concerns, you can go for it. It is good for basic application load balancing. If you don't have budget limitations or you have critical applications, you should definitely go for F5 because of the standardization and the product experience they have in handling mission-critical applications. 

Its initial setup is easy and not very complex. If you have a general understanding of how containers and VMware work, it is not very problematic to deploy it.

The initial setup documentation of HAProxy is good, but when you have to customize it for your application requirements, it gets difficult.

It is free of cost.

We have currently deployed it for one product. For non-critical applications, it is a good choice. You can definitely go for it if you have cost concerns, your application is not very dynamic, or you are looking for a basic load balancing product. 

I would rate HAProxy a six out of 10.

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.

I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit.

I have been using HAProxy for the past four to five months.

I do not have it in a full production environment to have those statistics. What I am currently using is stable.

I do not see enough traffic to make an honest critique of the stability.

I have not currently used technical support.

HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment.

The setup was not difficult it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC.
When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free.

I did look at NGINX.

I would rate HAProxy an eight out of ten.

We use it in a model teacher, project, and financial trading system.

Overall, it's a good solution.

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

We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs. 

We have used the solution for a while, however, we are currently moving away from it.

We are currently moving away from it. We changed our orchestrator solution and we move to something else and now use an internal proxy.

We are end-users and customers. We don't have a business relationship with the solution.

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We are using it for application load balancing.

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.

Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved. 

I have just started using HAProxy. In my organization, they've been using it for a year or two.

It was a little bit straightforward.

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

I would recommend HAProxy because it is free in the initial offer, which would work for low budget enterprises that don't have much to start with. 

I would rate HAProxy a seven out of ten. 

Our primary use for this solution is to mount service for Redis.

It made something possible where I do load balancing on a container, without having to configure it at the firewall.

The most valuable feature is the TCP load balancing. 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. I found that functionality to be quite useful.

The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic. Additional logging functionality with better documentation would be helpful.

I'm quite happy with the frequency in which new versions and updates come out. Each release either adds some functionality or fixes some bugs, from what I've seen. I've upgraded the HAProxy probably ten times now, and have never had an issue.

I have never had to use the solution's technical support.

I found that the setup was pretty straightforward, although I had read a book on HAProxy before I started the project. I had given it some thought in terms of what it was that I wanted to do. The book that I read was good, and it was easy for me to install the product.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance.

We are not paying for HAProxy support. We're using the free version, compiling it in a container, and using it. The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial. 

I chose this solution because I have to operate within a Docker container, and this is the only one that I could get to work.

Once the container is set up, the time it takes to deploy is typically under a minute. That is a full-blown solution with all the plugins and images that I'm planning on using. I'm pretty happy with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

HAProxy is used both as an external (customer facing) and internal (between service APIs) solution. We use it for SSL offload, domain and path based ACLs, request header manipulations, and much more.

Layer 7 health checks improved stability. Logs and metrics are very rich and easy to export which makes it easier for us to pinpoint once something is not working as we expect.

With each new release, I find very useful features and love each addition. Recently, the seamless reload feature was much needed and very helpful.

I would like to see a two (or more) native cluster support without third parties or DNS manipulations.