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."The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"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."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."
"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."
"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"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)."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"The configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer."
"The solution can be improved by controlling TCP behavior better and mandating to clients what the expected outcome must be in order to avoid receiving contestant timeout logs."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."
"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."
"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."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"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."
"Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."
"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, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, AWS App Mesh and Envoy. See our HAProxy vs. Istio report.
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.
