F5 BIG-IP vs. HAProxy Community Edition

LTM's scope of action goes beyond load balancing. Tools for control, governance, and application enhancement, as well as APIs like iRULE, are very important for day-to-day operations. Furthermore, the F5 BIG-IP WAF offers exceptional security. Advanced firewall and routing functionalities are helpful in more complex environments. O LTM possui um escopo de atuacao que vai alem do balanceamento. Ferramentas para controle, governanca e aprimoramento de aplicacoes e API como iRULE sao muito iportantes para o dia a dia a operacao. Alem disso o WAF do F5 BIG-IP tem uma qualidade de seguranca exceptional. As funcionalidades avancadas de firewall e roteamento ajudam em ambientes mais complexos. This review was originally written in Portuguese and has been translated into English using a third-party translation tool. While we strive for accuracy, some nuances or meanings may not be perfectly captured.

Incentivized

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

• My company is kind of like it's a safe thing if you log in and you provide another second login to get the code to log in, confirm that it's a correct that you are logged into the account and it just provides more for the company

Incentivized

• 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

• I think a couple of challenges. One, I mean the cost, it's not an inexpensive product, but I think it's probably parity with value, maybe a little on the pricey side of things.
• As far as features and what we'd like to see more cloud native type experiences like where NGINX and F5 kind of come together, we're moving more of the cloud just like everybody else, and it's a little clunky right now.

Incentivized

• 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

Stability of product and easy way to have account manager contact. F5 support team is also always available to help with major issues. Last year during the major OS upgrade F5 team and F5 leadership always shared clear information and F5 team was dedicated to help us to have it closed in record time

Incentivized

It is a good product to use but right now it is lacking the automation of certificates, management of iRules and automation of certain configuration. Also creating an APM policy from scratch with many APM agents take a long time due to slow load times of the GUI and the need to create everything from scratch every time. It's tough to reuse the configuration.

Incentivized

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

I've supported F5 for three different companies. Our F5 support has been very consistent, regardless who the customer is. F5 technicians are very experienced and provide good support, even when issues are more related to knowledge than they are with the ability of the product to do what you need it to do.

Incentivized

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

Practical cases and hands on , many hours of training with tipical cases

Incentivized

implementation is fine

Incentivized

We are recently not evaluating, but we have started the deployment for WAF and we're using GTM, LTM, you name it. F5, we are using all of them.

Incentivized

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

• The F5 BIG-IP has improved all our load balancing needs, we have over 400 LTM VIPs in our environment this all use to be done with DNS round Robin configurations.
• we have created unique APM solutions to support our external customer base

Incentivized

• 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