HAProxy vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 7, 2022

We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway 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 and is robust with excellent load balancing capabilities and many customization options. Several users note that the solution lacks proper documentation.

    Azure Application Gateway users say that it is easy to configure and has good reporting and alerting capabilities. A few users mention that they would like better integration options.
  • Pricing: HAProxy is open source and free of charge. Azure Application Gateway users say it is reasonably priced.

  • ROI: HAProxy reviewers report seeing an ROI. Azure Application Gateway reviewers do not mention ROI.
  • Service and Support: HAProxy is open-source and does not offer customer support. Azure Application Gateway users report being satisfied with the level of support they receive.

Comparison Results: HAProxy is the winner in this comparison. It is powerful, stable, and has good load balancing capabilities. In addition, HAProxy is free of charge and has a proven ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed HAProxy vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 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
"Advanced traffic rules, including stick tables and ACLs, which allow me to shape traffic while it's load balanced.""The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source.""The solution is user-friendly and efficient.""The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze.""It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions.""​​Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used.""It solves a problem for me where I can build files, not based on the health of the check, but rather the speed of the check.""I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."

More HAProxy Pros →

"The production is a valuable feature.""The most valuable feature of the solution is traffic management.""The solution has built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure.""Load balancing and web application firewall features are the most valuable.""The simplicity of the solution and its ability to integrate easily with others are its most valuable aspects.""The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway are the policies, the data store they are using, and the cloud platform it operates on.""It does an excellent job of load balancing.""We chose this solution in the first place because it has access to Layer 7. I can control the requests and the content, which I can access on my network if I want to even if it's forbidden access to other external resources. If I want to monitor, for example, traffic, and apply this rule on Layer 7, I can do so. This was our main goal when implementing this application. We wanted to take advantage of the Gateway capabilities."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Pros →

Cons
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files.""Documentation could be improved.""The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added.""The visibility could be improved.""HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets.""Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved.""Maybe HAProxy could be more modular.""HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."

More HAProxy Cons →

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway could improve by allowing features to use more third-party tools.""In the next release, the solution could improve the integration with Service Mesh and other Azure Security Services.""It takes a lot of time for a certificate to update in the system. That is a huge drawback, affecting the load-balancing side. And when there are changes to the load balancing, it affects the end-user.""Application Gateway’s limitation is that the private and the public endpoint cannot use the same port.""One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS.""Implementing and standardizing the solution across the IT landscape in a heterogeneous environment is painful.""I want the solution's support to improve. The tool is also expensive.""The support can be improved when you are configuring the system rules. The Disaster Recovery feature can be added in the next release. The price of the solution can be reduced a bit."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway 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 →

  • "It is not expensive."
  • "Every solution comes with a license and cost. Microsoft provides the license and the total cost is for the maintenance every year."
  • "Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."
  • "There is some additional cost, such as extended support."
  • "The cost is not an issue."
  • "The solution is reasonably priced compared to other solutions."
  • "The pricing is based on how much you use the solution."
  • "The solution is paid monthly. The solution is highly expensive."
  • More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    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:We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides excellent support. Azure Front Door can quickly detect abnormalities before the… more »
    Top Answer:Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft Azure Application Gateway web application firewall software was the better fit for… more »
    Top Answer:We can control what rules should be used and what should be disabled.
    Ranking
    Views
    11,015
    Comparisons
    7,606
    Reviews
    12
    Average Words per Review
    416
    Rating
    7.4
    Views
    7,571
    Comparisons
    6,479
    Reviews
    20
    Average Words per Review
    366
    Rating
    7.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
    Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
    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.

    Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

    To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

    Sample Customers
    Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
    Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
    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 Company28%
    Comms Service Provider20%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Transportation Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise33%
    Large Enterprise31%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise59%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business40%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise64%
    Buyer's Guide
    HAProxy vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about HAProxy vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 39 reviews while Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is ranked 4th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 38 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is rated 7.2. 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 Microsoft Azure Application Gateway writes "High stability with built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure". HAProxy is most compared with NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Envoy, whereas Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is most compared with Azure Front Door, Citrix NetScaler, F5 Advanced WAF, Cloudflare Web Application Firewall and Cloudflare. See our HAProxy vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway 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.