F5 BIG-IP DNS vs. HAProxy Community Edition

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
F5 BIG-IP DNS
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
F5 BIG-IP DNS (formerly BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager) secures DNS infrastructure.N/A
HAProxy Community Edition
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
HAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.N/A
Pricing
F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community Edition
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community Edition
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community Edition
Considered Both Products
F5 BIG-IP DNS
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
We have been big ip, big IP waf, advanced WAF and a PM. The A SM is part of it. We've been using many of those modules. So big IP is well integrated with other modules, right? So every individuals works for the specific required with specific aspects. So I would say they all …
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
IBM Security QRadar SIEM, Barracuda Email Protection, Barracuda Load Balancer ADC, Barracuda Web Security Gateway, Barracuda Application Protection, F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF, F5 Distributed Cloud WAF …
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Acknowledge Proactive Monitoring (APM)
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
It integrates well with our existing knowledge base.
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
It was my first exposure to F5 products and allows for a variety of environments, from complex to very simple infrastructure.
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
F5 DNS is like DNS with out training wheels and data that can help you make real changes and improvements.
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
DNS defines IP, LTM received and handles the Traffic, all encrypted
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and F5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
As I mentioned, the GSLB capability, being able to do intelligent DNS by having access to monitor specific endpoints associated to my current BIG-IP infrastructure, I believe that brings a huge value, then combine fast responses and security.
HAProxy Community Edition
Chose HAProxy Community Edition
We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, …
Chose HAProxy Community Edition
1st, HAProxy is free and a full software-based.
2nd, it has outperformed the BIG-IP in every test case.
3rd, we LOVE HAProxy.
Chose HAProxy Community Edition
The cost is significantly lower and personally I don't find one to be harder to learn than the other. Overall they features stack up pretty closely and I'd pick HAProxy wherever it was feasible and we can save a tremendous amount of money for the business. The NetScalers & …
Chose HAProxy Community Edition
HAProxy has been more reliable than any other load balancing product we have used or tried. It just works, pretty much flawlessly. Other competing products were unreliable and required a lot of maintenance.
Best Alternatives
F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community Edition
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community Edition
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community Edition
Likelihood to Recommend
It's well suited. Like I said, it provides us, it provides the clients and the business environments throughout an Internal Revenue Service. The network visibility needed for them to provide their application and the use of their applications throughout the Internal Revenue Service and the enterprise, as far as IRS.
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It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
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Pros
  • Routing the traffic to multiple data centers deployed in different locations
  • Examines the servers health, performance metrics and do evaluation on the basis of geography as well to redirect queries to optimal destination
  • Provides rate limiting feature to mitigate DDos and DNS flood attacks
  • Best in routing the traffic to multiple clouds including on prem resources
  • Faster results of the queries and reduced latency is one of the biggest advantages of F5 BIG-IP DNS
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  • Allow traffic to systems to be distributed evenly, providing high availability
  • Allow restrictions to resources using OAuth tokens
  • Allow load balancing of databases
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Cons
  • I'd like to see better reporting capabilities on the decision-making process for DNS resolutions. Currently there are plenty of log messages for that, but I'd like to see tighter integration into the GUI.
  • It could be an improvement to better discriminate features intended for AA vs LDNS functionality within the GUI.
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  • My understanding is a lack of support for UDP traffic
  • One mistake in the haproxy.cfg prevents the entire thing from starting rather than only affecting the part of the config file that may have a typo of some other syntax problem.
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Likelihood to Renew
We use this heavily and it is one of the best products out there for this type of use case. We already have LTMs and to leverage GTM on top of that is just a piece of cake. Everything is so well integrated its amazing
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No answers on this topic
Usability
Most important usability of F5 BIG-IP DNS is it’s stability which other vendors lack -As mentioned earlier as well, it’s scalability is humongous as it can honour millions of request per second without latency - irules feature makes it top and worthy to fight with top contenders like cloudflare and Cisco - Moreover it’s stable even when the Rate Per second is high and at the same time, DDos occurs - Interface is user friendly for simple tasks but requires more manual work - TAC should provide more assistance when it comes to normal support as well but they do offer professional support license for tasks which other vendor assist on normal license as well
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It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
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Alternatives Considered
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We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Well, yes, I would say a big impact for ours. We were able to have more visibilities and trying to allow those traffic that we weren't able to see what is behind the scene and then reduce a lot of attackers. And then it led us to actually allow our clients freely using the DOT or DOH.
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  • Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
  • Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
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ScreenShots