We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: HAProxy is the winner in this comparison. It is powerful, stable, and has good load balancing capabilities. In addition, HAProxy is free of charge and has a proven ROI.
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime."
"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."
"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions."
"Azure Application Gateway's most valuable feature is ease of use. The configuration is straightforward. It isn't difficult to adjust the size of your instances in the settings. You can do that with a few clicks, and the configuration file is the same way. You can also set rules and policies with minimal time and effort."
"We chose this solution in the first place because it has access to Layer 7. I can control the requests and the content, which I can access on my network if I want to even if it's forbidden access to other external resources. If I want to monitor, for example, traffic, and apply this rule on Layer 7, I can do so. This was our main goal when implementing this application. We wanted to take advantage of the Gateway capabilities."
"It has a filter available, although we are not currently using it because it is not part of our requirements. But it is a good option and when it becomes part of our requirements we will definitely use it."
"The health probe is pretty good for your backend health. It tells you whether it's communicating and talking to the endpoint correctly. It is quite useful."
"This is a SaaS product, so it is always up to date."
"Some of the key features of this solution are the low-level maintenance required, floating proxy service, and load balancing."
"In my experience, Microsoft products have a smooth integration and facilitate easy management and monitoring. Using Azure Application Gateway allows us to efficiently handle the system loads."
"We can control what rules should be used and what should be disabled."
"The visibility could be improved."
"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."
"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."
"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)."
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"Documentation could be improved."
"One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS."
"The security of the product could be adjusted."
"The support provided for the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement, especially when it comes to the response time from the support team."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is harder to manage than Imperva. It is not intuitive and stable compared to other products."
"The solution doesn’t support wildcard-based and regular expression-based rules."
"The solution has many limitations. You cannot upgrade the VPN to the application gateway. So I started with version one, which has limited capabilities, and they provided version two. And unfortunately, I cannot upgrade from v one to v two like other services. So I have to decommission the version one and create a new one with version two. Also the version one was complex with the certificates uploading the SQL certificates."
"The solution should provide more security for certificate-based services so that we can implement more security on that."
More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Pricing and Cost Advice →
HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 41 reviews while Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is ranked 4th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 40 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is rated 7.2. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway writes "High stability with built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure". HAProxy is most compared with NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler, Envoy and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), whereas Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is most compared with AWS WAF, Citrix NetScaler, F5 Advanced WAF, Azure Front Door and Cloudflare. See our HAProxy vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway report.
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We monitor all Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.