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 feature that I have found the most valuable is that it works for my use case of application load balancing. I'm using it for PeerSense, and it's easy enough for PeerSense."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"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."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"
"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."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network 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."
"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."
"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."
"The product does not have any new technologies."
"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."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
"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."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"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)."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"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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