HAProxy vs Kemp LoadMaster comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Sep 5, 2022

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.

  • Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions agree that their setup is straightforward.
  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability and scalability.

    HAProxy users say it is a complete, open-source product that is constantly improving and is helpful for basic application load balancing. Several users note that the solution lacks proper documentation.

    Kemp LoadMaster reviewers say it is robust, user friendly, has excellent load balancing, and provides high availability for their web services. Several users mention that the solution’s logging is hard to navigate.
  • Pricing: HAProxy is open source and free of charge. Kemp LoadMaster users say it is reasonably priced.

  • ROI: Users of both solutions report a satisfactory ROI.
  • Service and Support: HAProxy is open-source and does not offer customer support. Kemp LoadMaster users say that the solution’s support is excellent.

Comparison Results: Kemp LoadMaster comes out on top in this comparison. It is a comprehensive and powerful solution with excellent customer support.

To learn more, read our detailed HAProxy vs. Kemp LoadMaster Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 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 ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services.""I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment.""HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable.""We did not need technical support because the documentation is good.""It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements.""Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable.""HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment""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."

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"The security features are the most valuable features of this solution.""The pricing of the solution is valuable.""There is a simplicity to the setup and configuration.""Using Kemp as a front-facing service appliance, it allows me to have the flexibility of swapping out real servers behind the scenes without any intervention from my network team.""Mitigates content security policy issues.""With Kemp 360 Central, our customers get a nice overview of their Kemp products and an easy way to upgrade firmware on all devices from a single interface.""Managing and maintaining multiple servers is done in a single place.""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."

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Cons
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper.""We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files.""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.""The visibility could be improved.""The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs.""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.""HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets.""Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."

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"Several elements of the GUI need work. For example, if you have many content switches, it’s difficult to find the ones you need. And where is the search feature?""When we go serverless, we may again have to revisit this because the configuration needs to be changed. With this change, we can run into a lot of other configurations that we haven't got into, which involve additional expenses. It would be challenging to convince management to buy at that price point. It would be a balancing act of justifying that expense and the value, that is, how it is going to save a bit of time and make our platform secure. It can have better configuration ability. A lot of iterations happen when we have multiple servers pointing to the same domain. If we do not orchestrate carefully, it gets into a loop, which takes away the precious time of the user who is trying to subscribe to a service. It takes a little longer time to realize services as well as web pages.""I want to have the ability to pull a particular server. The DevOps portion was challenging for me, like if I needed to redirect from one IP to another URL. I needed to look that up, and the knowledge base is not well organized. When I look for information about Kemp on the Internet, I don't find many articles or something like that.""I want Kemp LoadMaster to provide users with better reporting capabilities in relation to TCP packets. In general, the connections that are present in the system require improvement.""The configuration of the basic services is pretty straight forward but for more complex solutions, there needs to be better documentation or knowledge base articles.""They need to improve the UI environment. Currently, it's hard to navigate and use product.""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.""Some of the support documentation seems to make assumptions that the person installing or configuring is experienced with the product or concepts."

More Kemp LoadMaster Cons →

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 →

  • "Download Kemp's VLM trial and take it for a test drive; you will be impressed."
  • "It has a very attractive ratio of price/performance."
  • "​I have control on the licensing and all the prices since I work for a partner.​"
  • "KEMP gives away free trials for 30 days. This can be stretched if you want. During the test, you will have access to KEMP support.​"
  • "It has a great price for the solution they offer."
  • "The license varies according to the number of megabits."
  • "Licensing is yearly and I am going to guess that it is CAN $2000.00."
  • "Any decent product will cost money and if you want great support and a great product, then you will want to spend the money on it."
  • More Kemp LoadMaster Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    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: It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions.
    Top Answer:Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten...The initial setup of Kemp LoadMaster is very simple.
    Top Answer:LoadMaster is cheaper than some other solutions. It has a perpetual license, so it's a one-time cost.
    Top Answer:My company is really happy with Kemp LoadMaster as a product. My company is also happy with the support we receive from Kemp LoadMaster. I want Kemp LoadMaster to provide users with better reporting… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    11,015
    Comparisons
    7,606
    Reviews
    12
    Average Words per Review
    416
    Rating
    7.4
    Views
    7,335
    Comparisons
    4,413
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    398
    Rating
    9.2
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
    LoadMaster Load Balancer
    Learn More
    HAProxy
    Video Not Available
    Overview

    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.

    Kemp LoadMaster is a powerful load balancing solution that also serves as a web application firewall. Its primary use case is load balancing and application load balancing, making it an ideal solution for organizations that must distribute traffic across multiple servers. Kemp's integration with an active directory for ESP usage, hosting/deployment of SSL certificates, and pricing are some of its most valuable features. 

    Using Kemp has helped organizations mitigate cross-scripting vulnerabilities, cookie-related issues, and content security policy issues. It has also allowed them to handle everything with Kemp instead of working on each application individually.

    Sample Customers
    Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
    Kent County Council, KEMP, SMA Solar Technology AG, RT€ Player , Victrix (Quebec, Canada), Texas A&M, Macmillan Cancer Support, Cisco, Austin Bank
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm35%
    Retailer15%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government9%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company27%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Energy/Utilities Company10%
    Transportation Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization57%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Government4%
    Comms Service Provider4%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise33%
    Large Enterprise31%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise59%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business45%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise29%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise63%
    Large Enterprise24%
    Buyer's Guide
    HAProxy vs. Kemp LoadMaster
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about HAProxy vs. Kemp LoadMaster and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 13 reviews while Kemp LoadMaster is ranked 6th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 7 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Kemp LoadMaster is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Open-source, simple to install, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kemp LoadMaster writes "A Cheap and Stable Load Balancing solution with various Features, Functionalities and a Good Support Team". HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Envoy, 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.