HAProxy Reviews

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.

The primary use case of HAProxy is for load balancing. 

This product is scalable and inexpensive. 

The visibility could be improved. Stability can falter when there is a lot of traffic. End-to-end connections are limited. 

Stability could be improved. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is good, it's provided to us by the distributor. 

Licensing costs are inexpensive. 

I rate this solution 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.

The cluster feature. I use it for my second informatic room.

Four days ago, I had an inundation in my informatic room, and there was no interruption of service, because HAProxy is an excellent cluster solution.

While the product is quite perfect, it could use more supervision and be more active. Also, more simplicity, more peripherals, and more scalability.

About five years.

Yes, the first time. I have an old VMware vCenter Server 6.0 . The VMware vCenter Server 6.0 cannot go with HAProxy. HAProxy developed a special feature for me to improve the function.

No issues. I have about 500 users on HAProxy, which use a web server and mail server.

No majors issues to contact them, but did contact them regarding questions about the product.

I have used before a server from Microsoft, and a server is very slow as a solution.

The product is very simple to install and to use.

Yeah, but I don't remember it, because the other product was very bad in comparison to HAProxy.

The product is very simple and fast. It's a microchannel.

Try it and if you like it, you buy it.

Reliability and transparency are the most valuable features.

This product is replacing another balancer which was not supported anymore. So, there is no major improvement for us.

In general, the improvement is in terms of the balancer sense which is moving from a single web server/single point of failure to using several back-end servers, that greatly improves the speed and reliable uptime.

I would improve the web-based UI, but it’s a matter of personal preference.

I have used this solution for one year.

There were no stability issues, it’s a stable product.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is very good , they are quick and responsive, which is essential for any product to succeed in this market.

Previously, we were using another product but it is no longer supported.

For the most part, the setup is pretty straightforward. However, as I mentioned earlier, thanks to the very good and quick technical support, all the complex requirements that we had were resolved quickly.

The pricing is good compared to the other similar products.

We evaluated at least four to five other products.

It’s a reliable product with good technical support.

We are using HAProxy for our internal load balancers between the front-end and back-end services. HAProxies are configured either manually (LVS redundancy included) or automatically (ambassador pattern by using a Consul & Consul-Template).

It reduced the load on our main load balancers.

• Flexible health-checking
• Good config format to auto-configure

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

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

We did not need technical support because the documentation is good.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible.

We pretty much know all the software out there and its capabilities, so we did not evaluate anything else.

Use a split front-end and back-end instead of using the "listen" directive. Therefore, you are clear what you are setting up. 

Be aware of connections dropping during restarts, etc.

I'm using HAProxy in two use cases. 

The first is as an internal load balancer for OpenStack services, in private cloud solutions. So HAProxy is used in front of Galera (MySQL cluster), Nova API, and also in front of exposed docker services. 

The second use case is as a load balancer for a Web hosting solution. HAProxy is load balancing external traffic.

Configuration of HAProxy includes brute force sandboxing (including stick tables and hardcoded ACL for defined paths), splitting traffic by dynamic and static content to redirect it to the proper back-end, SSL, and HTTP headers management.

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.

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

Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are also very valuable.

In my opinion, there are three main areas to improve:

1. Make remote management more modern by adding API.
2. Propose a general HA solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this).
3. Thread option should be a bit more stable.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability, but multiprocess config for HAProxy is more efficient than multi-thread.

I used NGINX in my Web environment. HAProxy has more traffic shaping options and it's a dedicated VNF load-balancer.

Initial setup was straightforward. The documentation is pretty thorough and up to date, and it is also easy to search.

During the implementation, you have to plan ACLs and back-ends first. That allows you to prepare a cleaner config.

I rate HAProxy a 10 out of 10. It is fast, flexible, and rock solid.