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Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. HAProxy Community Edition

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software

    Score9 out of 10
    N/ACisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software is the core OS for the ASA suite. It provides firewall functionality, as well as integration with context-specific Cisco security modules. It is scaled for enterprise-level traffic and connections.N/A

    HAProxy Community Edition

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/AHAProxy 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.

    $0

    Pricing
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareHAProxy Community Edition
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareHAProxy 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
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareHAProxy Community Edition
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Our Palo Altos and Cisco ASAs are pretty comparable. They both seem to work well when used in an HA pair. They can both do IP/Port based ACLs. But the Palos also have APP-ID which helps to make sure that the traffic passing through your firewall is the type of traffic …
    Incentivized
    Open Source
    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 & …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    87%
    Would buy again
    40 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    42 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    91%
    Happy with the feature set
    42 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    36 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    41 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareHAProxy Community Edition
    Firewall
    Comparison of Firewall features of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and HAProxy Community Edition
    Feature
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    8.9
    50 Ratings
    4% above category average
    HAProxy Community Edition
    -
    Ratings
    Identification Technologies7.932 Ratings00 Ratings
    Visualization Tools7.931 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Inspection8.433 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based Controls8.446 Ratings00 Ratings
    Active Directory and LDAP8.448 Ratings00 Ratings
    Firewall Management Console9.049 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting and Logging8.949 Ratings00 Ratings
    VPN10.049 Ratings00 Ratings
    High Availability9.649 Ratings00 Ratings
    Stateful Inspection10.046 Ratings00 Ratings
    Proxy Server9.032 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareHAProxy Community Edition
    Small Businesses
    SonicWall NSA Series
    Score8.3 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
    Score9.6 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
    Score8.8 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareHAProxy Community Edition
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (88 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.1
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.7
    (8 ratings)
    9.7
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    6.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareHAProxy Community Edition
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Cisco ASA's are great for internal network connected access between a firewall and the central management server. And, for complex networks where high security requirements with overly strict compliance are necessary. For networks with limited connectivity to the core or for poor network connectivity these are not the best solution. There are other more stand-alone firewall's that do this better. These firewall's are a little more complex to set up to start with so significant knowledge of these devices is required to set them up and ensure they are best practice installed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • ASA is our VPN concentrator. The client and server are very stable and very easy to use
    • ASA also offers Intrusion Prevention, to an extent. This is also very useful for an improved security posture for a small company
    • ASA allowed us to scale very quickly. We could onboard clients, partners, and consultants and give them a great onboarding experience as well
    • Administrative costs with ASA are low. It's very easy to administer.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    • Low-Cost Load Balancer
    • Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
    • Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
    • SSL Termination
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • The ASDM software is at times a nightmare to install because of different java versions[.]
    • [The firewall] could do with a power button, just to be able to do a hard reboot when needed[.]
    • It would be nice to manage the firewall via the web on port 443[.]
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    • A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    To be honest there has been now great products out in the market compared to Cisco ASA. I beleieve Cisco has to do a lot of improvement in this area. The other defeiniete factors is the cost when it comes to renewals which is always a premium on Cisco products
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Open Source
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    I generally have not noticed the outages, however since it's a machine it can malfunction, we need to implement the firewall infrastructure in such a way that it is highly available with device failure, region failure etc. Else any solution will be having the issues if they are not build with resiliency.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    The support is usually very good and gets back to you very quickly. However I had some instances of when two engineers will give me wildly different answers to what I thought was a simple question. Overall however I do rate the support highly and they are generally always very good.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    It was quite a good one, how ever requires an expertise to deploy hence the SMB segment would be finding it difficult to implement this product. The one good reason is that there are lot of ASA certified engineers in compared to the other certified engineers. Hence this resembles positively on the deployment as you have quite a lot of experienced engineer on your deployment
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    We were using [pfSense] before in our environment but we regularly facing difficulties over it due to software bugs & downtime. After implementing Cisco ASA, it resolved our availability issue & provides us a reliable solution with the best security features & easy to understand GUI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • Most network engineers have worked with ASA, so there is no need for re-training when adding or turning over staff
    • Current configs from older devices plug in easily, and are operational on larger devices if an upgrade is required
    • Many support options available
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots