We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Kemp LoadMaster based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Kemp LoadMaster comes out on top in this comparison. It is a comprehensive and powerful solution with excellent customer support.
"It solves a problem for me where I can build files, not based on the health of the check, but rather the speed of the check."
"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"Failover is seamless and our services are rock solid."
"One of the most valuable features I like is the ability to block specific cipher suites like RC4, and older protocols like SSL 3.0."
"The feature that allows us to easily disconnect a server when we need and bring back online is the most valuable. It's a click of a button. This allows us to keep all systems up. We can then run updates, perform reboots whatever we need to one of the servers without taking production down."
"There is a simplicity to the setup and configuration."
"It has been functional. We don't have any outages."
"It is an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface, and you can set up a new VIP in a couple of minutes."
"The most valuable feature so far has been the high-availability options that allowed us to add an additional Kemp LoadMaster VLM virtual appliance into our VMware vSphere environment, to provide failover for our existing LoadMaster."
"The base feature of Kemp LoadMaster load balancing ticks all the boxes but the most valuable features would be the security features Intrusion Prevention (IPS) and Web Application Firewall (WAF)."
"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."
"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."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"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."
"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."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."
"Although Kemp is very user-friendly, it lacks a more custom configuration."
"Some of the support documentation seems to make assumptions that the person installing or configuring is experienced with the product or concepts."
"It would be very helpful to get all the http/https session logs by default in the log monitor without activating debugging mode like an apache web sever natively does"
"In the next release, they can introduce 360 views in the same dashboard to make it easier for users to view. The graphical information should be displayed on the dashboard."
"The auth website of ESP is really lacking. It’s not responsive (mobile friendly) and the procedure of changing the website is difficult. We tend to avoid using pre-auth for that reason."
"If you want logging for SMTP traffic, you have to enable ESP, which requires you to define allowed IP addresses. That’s irritating, to say the least."
"Perhaps Kemp could offer some training videos."
"The ability to see live traffic is not great and can be improved."
HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 41 reviews while Kemp LoadMaster is ranked 6th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 48 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Kemp LoadMaster is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kemp LoadMaster writes "Reliable, easy to set up, and can increase your security score". HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Citrix NetScaler, Envoy and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), whereas Kemp LoadMaster is most compared with NGINX Plus, Fortinet FortiADC, Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and A10 Networks Thunder ADC. See our HAProxy vs. Kemp LoadMaster report.
See our list of best Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) vendors.
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.
