Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs HAProxy comparison

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Avi Networks Logo
3,020 views|1,946 comparisons
71% willing to recommend
HAProxy Logo
10,621 views|7,206 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Avi Networks Software Load Balancer and HAProxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs. HAProxy Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The WAF - the web application firewall itself - is great.""The friendly user interface is valuable.""The solution has simplified our network infrastructure management.""The most valuable feature of the solution for my organization is its UI since it allows us to see the clusters while providing a very specific and good overall understanding.""Its visibility and login mechanism are the best parts. In addition to the great visibility it has a great dashboard and an easy to configure graphic user interface, a beautiful GUI.""The solution is stable.""What's most valuable in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its deployment capability, the ability to deploy in a dispersed service, with the service engines that can disperse and have a single control plane that can control the load balancing services across any available platform, wherever needed. The analytics of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer and flexibility of deployment are its most valuable features and the reasons why many people buy it.""The interface and software features are the most valuable aspects of this solution."

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"It is scalable.""Stability is number one.""The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used.""The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something.""Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature.""​​Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used.""Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable.""We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."

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Cons
"Avi Networks Software Load Balancer needs to improve its documentation.""The network analytics and monitoring features are not effective.""IDS and IPS sites need to be more progressive.""I did not go with it because their APM module is a different product altogether. It's a common thing that companies do. They sell something and then they add on top of it as a different product. It is a type of marketing strategy. But when it comes to the overall management, it takes a lot of time to really look into it.""It doesn't match the development structure or user community of our existing product. It pales in comparison to that.""The initial setup is a bit complex.""In terms of improvement, the pricing and documentation need improvement. We have had problems getting the documents.""One struggle with Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its integration with other VMware products. Integration could be improved in the solution so that you have a more unified control plane with it and other data center security and networking products that VMware sells. There has been a bit of a lag on the roadmap of new features that have come out there recently, but better interoperability with the hyperscale environments such as the AWS, Azure, GCPs of the world, and simpler deployment and interoperability with those existing tools, are areas that are receiving attention and could use additional attention today. These are the areas for improvement in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer."

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"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular.""We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files.""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. It could be cheaper.""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).""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.""The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs.""We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "With Avi Networks, you can buy a 10-Gig license and, if your primary data center goes down, in the flick of a switch you can move that license to your backup data center and it will generate the traffic... there are a lot of cost-effective measures."
  • "The licensing costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer are really variable. The product can be sold from a bandwidth utilization perspective. It can be sold from a per CPU perspective, depending on if you're looking at on-premises or hyperscale environments. Licensing costs vary quite a bit if you're familiar with the AWS Calculator, where you can see that it can widely vary per licensing model. On a scale of one to five, with one being not very good value for the money and five being great, I would rate the pricing for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer a five because its pricing is extremely competitive. Not all features are included with the license, for example, there's single licensing."
  • "I rate the solution price a four to five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high, since it is an affordable tool."
  • "The tool is expensive."
  • More Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."
  • "The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."
  • "Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."
  • "Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."
  • "If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
  • "We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
  • "I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
  • "The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."
  • More HAProxy Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The solution has simplified our network infrastructure management.
    Top Answer:The tool is expensive. It is not cheap. The product must be cheaper.
    Top Answer:The network analytics and monitoring features are not effective. The product does not provide deep troubleshooting features. The solution must provide public IP features. F5 provides such features.
    Top Answer:I do recommend HAProxy for more simple applications or for companies with a low budget, since HAProxy is a free, open-source product. HAProxy is also a good choice for someone looking for a stable… more »
    Top Answer:HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable.
    Top Answer:I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution.
    Ranking
    Views
    3,020
    Comparisons
    1,946
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    655
    Rating
    8.4
    Views
    10,621
    Comparisons
    7,206
    Reviews
    13
    Average Words per Review
    436
    Rating
    7.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Avi Software Load Balancer
    HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
    Learn More
    HAProxy
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    Overview

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is an application delivery controller (ADC) platform. The solution provides scalable application delivery across any infrastructure and allows your organization to deliver multi-cloud application services, such as load balancing, autoscaling, application security, container networking, and web application firewall. It is designed with 100% software load balancing to ensure a fast and secure application experience. Additionally, Avi Networks Software Load Balancer offers elasticity and delivers intelligence across any environment.

    The Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is unique because

    • It can scale from 0 to 1 million SSL transactions per second in minutes.
    • It can achieve 90% faster provisioning and 50% lower TCO than a traditional appliance-based approach.

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Product Highlights

    • Troubleshoots application issues in less than a minute.
    • Alerts you of potential risks with SSL certificates and TLS versions used.
    • End-to-end timing for each transaction to help solve end-user experience issues.

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Features

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Automated application delivery
    • Seamless integration with the CI/CD
    • Built-in analytics
    • End-to-end visibility
    • Actionable insights
    • Security
    • “Network DVR”-like capability to record and replay specific transactions
    • Google-like search filters transactions based on device, location, errors, etc.

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Avi Networks Software Load Balancer. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Multi-cloud application services: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer provides consistent, enterprise-grade application services, including load balancing, WAF, and container networking across heterogeneous environments. The multi-cloud application services can be deployed on bare metal, VMs, or containers in any data center or public cloud environments.
    • Faster application provisioning: With this solution, you gain automation with 100% REST APIs and self-service like public cloud.
    • Better business decisions: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer uses analytics to deliver application insights and help you drive more intelligent decisions.
    • Containerized applications: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is a proven solution to deploy container-based workloads in production environments using Kubernetes/OpenShift/Tanzu clusters. It includes multi-cluster, multi-site support for containerized applications.
    • Lower TCO: The solution is 100% software, and does not require any proprietary hardware. In addition, because it offers on-demand autoscaling, there is no over-provisioning. Lastly, point-and-click application troubleshooting means there is no need for a black box.
    • Software-defined architecture: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is designed with a software-defined architecture with a centralized control plane (Avi Controller) and distributed data plane (Avi Service Engine). Because of this, elastic autoscaling is made easy.
    • Better end-user visibility: The solution gives you granular visibility into end-user experiences and server response in real time. It also empowers application owners with end-user stats to optimize and improve apps.
    • Application health score: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer summarizes analytics information into a helpful health score that provides a quick snapshot of the overall applications. The health score it provides is determined by server response time, resource usage, anomalous traffic, and security posture.

    HAProxy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the fastest and most popular and trusted software load balancer products in the marketplace today. Organizations are able to immediately deploy HAProxy solutions to enable websites and applications to optimize performance, security, and observability. HAProxy solutions are available to scale to any environment.

    HAProxy is an open-source product and has a robust, active, reliable community. The solutions are continually tested and improved on by the community. HAProxy offers a dynamic design to support the most modern architectures, microservices, and deployment environments (appliances, containers, virtual, and cloud).

    HAProxy utilizes a cloud-native protocol, which makes it a complete solution for cloud services such as Red Hat OpenShift, OVH, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more. It also can be used as the reference load balancer in OpenStack.

    HAProxy Products

    • HAProxy One: This is a next-gen end-to-end application delivery platform created to secure and streamline modern application architectures. It offers a complete suite of solutions, such as application delivery software, turnkey, and appliance services observed and administered through a central control plane. The product supplies application acceleration, CDN, DDoS, bot management, WAF capabilities, and load balancing.
    • HAProxy Fusion Control Plane: This product enables organizations to streamline workflows, arrange traffic routing and security protocols, enhance the speed of delivery, and scale out of the organization’s applications. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane offers an intuitive user interface to observe and control the complete product lineup and API for administering numerous fleets of HAProxy Enterprise servers, either in the cloud or on premises.
    • HAProxy Edge: This product offering is an application delivery network (ADN) that provides a broad array of turnkey application services with amazing scale and complete visibility. Services include application and content acceleration, advanced security, and load balancing.
    • HAProxy ALOHA Hardware or Virtual Load Balancer: This product is a virtual load balancer or plug-and-play hardware constructed upon HAProxy Enterprise that is designed to support proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7. It has a user-friendly GUI, simple deployment, and no limit on backend servers, making it a complete product for organizations desiring a reliable system to provide high-end load distribution for critical services.
    • HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller: This product is designed to facilitate smooth traffic flow into a Kubernetes cluster. It is able to automatically discover anomalies and changes in an organization's Kubernetes infrastructure and provide precise distribution of traffic to healthy pods, with no downtime caused by poor pod health or scaling changes. The product comes with an embedded WAF to optimize the security of an organization’s applications running in Kubernetes.
    • HAProxy Enterprise: This product is the enterprise-class edition of HAProxy offering a dynamic and sturdy code base with next-generation features, an enterprise suite of add-ons, professional services, and trusted support. 

      • Cluster-wide tracking and rate limiting
      • Advanced DDoS and bot management
      • Web application firewall
      • Reliable expert support
      • High performance modules
      • Device detection and geolocation
      • Real-time dashboard

    Reviews from Real Users

    Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind.” - Nathanel S., Platform Architect at SES

    “I use HAProxy for individuals who can not buy low balancers. I built NFV in a box and send individuals a pathway into an HAProxy VM. The setup was not difficult; it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC. When it comes to pricing, HAProxy is free.” - Nasir O., Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.

    Sample Customers
    Palo Alto Networks, DGDean, Swisslos
    Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government9%
    Healthcare Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm35%
    Retailer13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government9%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise59%
    Buyer's Guide
    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs. HAProxy
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs. HAProxy and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is ranked 9th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 8 reviews while HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 40 reviews. Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is rated 8.2, while HAProxy is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer writes "Easy to set up and has good integration into the host environment but needs better third party integration". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Offers good integration capabilities but needs to improve the monitoring part". Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is most compared with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Citrix NetScaler, NGINX Plus, Radware Alteon and A10 Networks Thunder ADC, whereas HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler and Radware Alteon. See our Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs. HAProxy 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.