We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Istio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Service Mesh solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."
"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."
"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."
"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."
"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."
"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."
"The load balancing, service application, and monitoring of the life of the service are valuable features. We use it for authentication of call services, load balancing the calls among the service providers on service instances, and monitoring the health of the services."
"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."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets."
"The visibility could be improved."
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"The web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible)."
"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."
"If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning."
"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."
"For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
HAProxy is ranked 2nd in Service Mesh with 41 reviews while Istio is ranked 1st in Service Mesh with 6 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Istio is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Istio writes "Provides traffic management and its mutual TLS authentication helps control the access policies". HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler and Loadbalancer.org, whereas Istio is most compared with Kong Mesh, NGINX Service-Mesh, AWS App Mesh, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh and Envoy. See our HAProxy vs. Istio report.
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