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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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.