Envoy vs HAProxy comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
Envoy Logo
2,880 views|2,727 comparisons
HAProxy Logo
732 views|488 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Envoy and HAProxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, HAProxy, Kong and others in Service Mesh.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pricing and Cost Advice
Information Not Available
  • "HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."
  • "The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."
  • "Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
  • "Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."
  • "If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
  • "We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
  • "I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
  • "The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."
  • More HAProxy Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Service Mesh solutions are best for your needs.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Questions from the Community
    Ask a question

    Earn 20 points

    Top Answer:I do recommend HAProxy for more simple applications or for companies with a low budget, since HAProxy is a free, open-source product. HAProxy is also a good choice for someone looking for a stable… more »
    Top Answer:HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable.
    Top Answer:I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution.
    Ranking
    5th
    out of 11 in Service Mesh
    Views
    2,880
    Comparisons
    2,727
    Reviews
    0
    Average Words per Review
    0
    Rating
    N/A
    2nd
    out of 11 in Service Mesh
    Views
    732
    Comparisons
    488
    Reviews
    13
    Average Words per Review
    436
    Rating
    7.4
    Comparisons
    Traefik Enterprise logo
    Compared 22% of the time.
    Kong Mesh logo
    Compared 18% of the time.
    NGINX Service-Mesh logo
    Compared 17% of the time.
    Istio logo
    Compared 8% of the time.
    AWS App Mesh logo
    Compared 3% of the time.
    NGINX Plus logo
    Compared 14% of the time.
    Kemp LoadMaster logo
    Compared 13% of the time.
    Citrix NetScaler logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    Istio logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    Also Known As
    HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
    Learn More
    Envoy
    Video Not Available
    HAProxy
    Video Not Available
    Overview

    As on the ground microservice practitioners quickly realize, the majority of operational problems that arise when moving to a distributed architecture are ultimately grounded in two areas: networking and observability. It is simply an orders of magnitude larger problem to network and debug a set of intertwined distributed services versus a single monolithic application.

    Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures. Built on the learnings of solutions such as NGINX, HAProxy, hardware load balancers, and cloud load balancers, Envoy runs alongside every application and abstracts the network by providing common features in a platform-agnostic manner. When all service traffic in an infrastructure flows via an Envoy mesh, it becomes easy to visualize problem areas via consistent observability, tune overall performance, and add substrate features in a single place.

    HAProxy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the fastest and most popular and trusted software load balancer products in the marketplace today. Organizations are able to immediately deploy HAProxy solutions to enable websites and applications to optimize performance, security, and observability. HAProxy solutions are available to scale to any environment.

    HAProxy is an open-source product and has a robust, active, reliable community. The solutions are continually tested and improved on by the community. HAProxy offers a dynamic design to support the most modern architectures, microservices, and deployment environments (appliances, containers, virtual, and cloud).

    HAProxy utilizes a cloud-native protocol, which makes it a complete solution for cloud services such as Red Hat OpenShift, OVH, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more. It also can be used as the reference load balancer in OpenStack.

    HAProxy Products

    • HAProxy One: This is a next-gen end-to-end application delivery platform created to secure and streamline modern application architectures. It offers a complete suite of solutions, such as application delivery software, turnkey, and appliance services observed and administered through a central control plane. The product supplies application acceleration, CDN, DDoS, bot management, WAF capabilities, and load balancing.
    • HAProxy Fusion Control Plane: This product enables organizations to streamline workflows, arrange traffic routing and security protocols, enhance the speed of delivery, and scale out of the organization’s applications. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane offers an intuitive user interface to observe and control the complete product lineup and API for administering numerous fleets of HAProxy Enterprise servers, either in the cloud or on premises.
    • HAProxy Edge: This product offering is an application delivery network (ADN) that provides a broad array of turnkey application services with amazing scale and complete visibility. Services include application and content acceleration, advanced security, and load balancing.
    • HAProxy ALOHA Hardware or Virtual Load Balancer: This product is a virtual load balancer or plug-and-play hardware constructed upon HAProxy Enterprise that is designed to support proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7. It has a user-friendly GUI, simple deployment, and no limit on backend servers, making it a complete product for organizations desiring a reliable system to provide high-end load distribution for critical services.
    • HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller: This product is designed to facilitate smooth traffic flow into a Kubernetes cluster. It is able to automatically discover anomalies and changes in an organization's Kubernetes infrastructure and provide precise distribution of traffic to healthy pods, with no downtime caused by poor pod health or scaling changes. The product comes with an embedded WAF to optimize the security of an organization’s applications running in Kubernetes.
    • HAProxy Enterprise: This product is the enterprise-class edition of HAProxy offering a dynamic and sturdy code base with next-generation features, an enterprise suite of add-ons, professional services, and trusted support. 

      • Cluster-wide tracking and rate limiting
      • Advanced DDoS and bot management
      • Web application firewall
      • Reliable expert support
      • High performance modules
      • Device detection and geolocation
      • Real-time dashboard

    Reviews from Real Users

    Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind.” - Nathanel S., Platform Architect at SES

    “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. The setup was not difficult; it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC. When it comes to pricing, HAProxy is free.” - Nasir O., Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.

    Sample Customers
    Airbnb, Booking.com, Cookpad, Digital Ocean, Ebay, F5, Google, GO-JEK, Grubhub, IBM, Medium, Microsoft, Netflix, Pinterest, Salesforce.com, Snapchat, Stripe, Square, Tencent, Twilio, Uber, Verizon, VMware, Vsco, Yahoo Japan, Yelp
    Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Comms Service Provider5%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm35%
    Retailer13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government9%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise68%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%

    Envoy is ranked 5th in Service Mesh while HAProxy is ranked 2nd in Service Mesh with 41 reviews. Envoy is rated 0.0, while HAProxy is rated 8.2. On the other hand, the top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Offers good integration capabilities but needs to improve the monitoring part". Envoy is most compared with Traefik Enterprise, Kong Mesh, NGINX Service-Mesh, Istio and AWS App Mesh, whereas HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler and Istio.

    See our list of best Service Mesh vendors.

    We monitor all Service Mesh 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.