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.
Comparison Results: Kemp LoadMaster comes out on top in this comparison. It is a comprehensive and powerful solution with excellent customer support.
"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."
"It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions."
"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."
"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."
"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."
"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"Load-balancing is a great feature that is very easy to configure and it is always working fine."
"Failover is seamless and our services are rock solid."
"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."
"We needed a Microsoft Threat Management Gateway server replacement solution for a customer and were impressed with the simplified deployment of the Kemp LoadMasters."
"Mitigates content security policy issues."
"It has greatly fortified the performance and uptime of our front-door email ingress, simplified and segmented mail routing, and reduced admin overhead for mail issue resolution and troubleshooting."
"It is an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface, and you can set up a new VIP in a couple of minutes."
"The most beneficial function of using the ADC is to ensure this resiliency."
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"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."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"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."
"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)."
"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."
"HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets."
"It has all types of logs and they are very detailed, but it's a little bit hard to search for a single event."
"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 would like to see more automation and control of overactive and inactive resources. If I could schedule these around our updates then it would be all automated. I would like to set up an automated script to coincide with the scripts I use to update resources and servers."
"It lacks an officially supported, well-written SCOM Management Pack."
"They were still in the process of development, and for example, we set it up in a cluster. So it was one logistical unit built out of two physical devices. And the expected behavior, which I know from other devices, will be formed into a logic cluster. It's that you configure one unit. Then you bring the second unit into this cluster with the already configured primary unit. So the secondary box pulls all the configured ones from its neighbor, does everything automatically, and then synchronizes with this primary neighbor. And then it works, like, one logical unit. And this didn't work with the Kemp's initially, where they caused a lot of issues when building up a cluster, so there were some specials on how to set this up. When we built or set them up for the first time and the months afterward with no new software releases, there were a couple of problems, but in the end, they worked fine. So, they developed a lot and learned from what they've responded to, what we responded to them, and what needs fixing."
"So far, the only hitch we have run into is that would have been nice to have an easier method to add allow/whitelist entries into the Access Control lists for virtual services."
"If I had to change something it would maybe be to have a little better reporting graphics that show more details in the reporting. It seems to be a little small in the graphic, and I'm not sure if possible but maybe a GUI page that one can use to monitor if any server goes down."
"The auth website of ESP is really lacking. It’s not responsive (mobile friendly) and the procedure of changing the website is difficult. We tend to avoid using pre-auth for that reason."
HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 39 reviews while Kemp LoadMaster is ranked 6th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 48 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Kemp LoadMaster is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Offers good integration capabilities but needs to improve the monitoring part". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kemp LoadMaster writes "Reliable, easy to set up, and can increase your security score". 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.
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