We performed a comparison between F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), HAProxy, and Loadbalancer.org based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Citrix, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)."The stability is excellent."
"I was able to simply and quickly set up the WAF rules and security, and also set up easily complex policies and rules which gave me some great features to redirect."
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) improves the resilience and quality of the application itself, the speed and the user experience for the application. The data that the users need from the application is actually acquired faster. So, it provides faster data acquisition."
"Where we are finding the AWS version helpful is when we are trying to scale up new environments. AWS Marketplace helps here a lot."
"The solution could improve the ease of use, the management could be simplified. Other solutions are easier to use."
"We like the capability to combine the content switching with the intrusion prevention and adding the security roles, so we can expose certain sub-pieces outside without exposing everything."
"Users can see a remarkable performance difference from a qualitative sense."
"The feature I find the most valuable is the support infrastructure."
"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."
"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."
"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."
"The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors."
"It helps us to route the traffic to the available servers. If we didn't have Loadbalancer we would fail to set the end-user and it would cause a failure in the cluster."
"For now, it's stable."
"We can more easily set up a test environment, because you can easily configure your forms. It makes it more flexible for us, to convert our test environment to a production environment, without having to change DNSs on the outside. You just configure the forms on the inside. So without changing the actual endpoint for the end user, we can create completely different networks in the background."
"Loadbalancer is easy to use. It performs well, with low latency."
"It does what it’s supposed to do which is balancing an important intranet site we are using, so if one server dies, the second becomes active straight away."
"The load balancers have an easy installation and a relatively simple, easy user interface to use."
"We have about 30,000 connections going through at any one time and it's fine, it doesn't seem to sweat. It doesn't get overloaded."
"We now get notifications when pool members go down, and we eliminate our downtime by not sending traffic to downed pool members."
"There are not very many areas for improvement, but the price is high."
"I would like them to expand load balancing, being able to go across multiple regions to on-premise and into the cloud. This could use improvement, as it is sometimes a little cumbersome."
"While the licensing is good through the AWS Marketplace, it is more expensive than what you could buy yourself."
"There is a need for a more modular version to concentrate on the current monolithic structure of both the virtual and hardware versions."
"The one gap I saw was that pure LBN integration is a little tricky. The insertion of F5 in LBN is a little tricky. They need to work on something, on products by which they can insert F5 in any sort of cloud environment."
"I think the logging could be improved."
"To improve the product, they could add more load balancing solutions in Kubernetes."
"For a future release, I would like to see more features in the cloud."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"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)."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Possibly a more graphical overview page (with colors) to give a two second overview to see if everything is working fine."
"It would be great if there was a way to gain access to the graphing data, to create custom reports. If we had a way to use the graphing data, we could use it to present certain information to our client, such as the uptime status for their service."
"We could enhance the security aspects of the load balancer."
"Compared to the physical products, the solution's throughput is a little less."
"The automatic refresh of the System Overview webpage: It sometimes has an extra webpage reload (after a change) before you see it is executed. This can be confusing."
"They're mostly designed to balance a particular type of traffic. I wanted to load balance DNS, and they just don't do it the way that we wanted to. So they're not used as DNS load balancers."
"I'd like to see scalability improved; it can be costly."
"There are many features you can set in the backend of Loadbalancer. They should simplify the configuration. The administrator should be able to configure it more simply. How it is now, you can only configure it if you have a lot of experience."
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