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."Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."
"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."
"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."
"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."
"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."
"The features I find valuable in this solution are session control which automatically disconnects users that forget to log off, and the ability to write rules to either allow or block certain file requests."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this."
"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."
"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."
"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source."
"The visibility could be improved."
"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is."
"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."
"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."
"HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets."
"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 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's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."
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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