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.
"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"
"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."
"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 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."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."
"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."
"It does an excellent job of load balancing."
"This is a SaaS product, so it is always up to date."
"I like the tool's stability and performance."
"Using policies to link and manage these URL-based routing configurations is also valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is its ease of use."
"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."
"The solution was very easy to configure. It wasn't hard at all to adjust it to our needs."
"The load balancing features are valuable."
"There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"Documentation could be improved."
"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."
"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."
"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."
"Improving the documentation with multiple examples and scenarios would be beneficial. Most users encounter similar situations, so having a variety of scenarios readily available on the tool's website would be helpful. For instance, if I were part of the HAProxy team, I'd create a webpage with different scenarios and provide files for each scenario. This way, users wouldn't have to start from scratch every time."
"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"The solution could improve by increasing the performance when doing updates. For example, if I change the certificate it can take 30 minutes. Other vendors do not have this type of problem."
"Implementing and standardizing the solution across the IT landscape in a heterogeneous environment is painful."
"The solution doesn’t support wildcard-based and regular expression-based rules."
"The support provided for the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement, especially when it comes to the response time from the support team."
"Scalability can be an issue."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway could improve by allowing features to use more third-party tools."
"The increased security that we are considering is because of some of the things that the security team has brought to our attention. They have pointed out that we would most likely require a better web application firewall than Azure Application Gateway."
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 43 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 F5 Advanced WAF, Citrix NetScaler, AWS WAF, Cloudflare Web Application Firewall 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.