Fastly Edge Cloud Platform vs. HAProxy Community Edition

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Fastly Edge Cloud Platform
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Fastly, headquartered in San Francisco, offers the Fastly Edge Cloud Computing, Content Delivery Network (CDN) (formerly Fastly Deliver@Edge). Priced by bandwidth in gigabytes and number of file requests, Fastly supports image optimization, video and streaming, load balancing, and cloud security via web application firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection. Additionally, Fastly is available as a managed CDN.
$0
per 10,000 requests
HAProxy Community Edition
Score 9.4 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.
$0
Pricing
Fastly Edge Cloud PlatformHAProxy Community Edition
Editions & Modules
Requests
$0
per 10,000 requests
Next 10TB
$0.08
per GB/per reigon
First 10TB
$0.12
per GB/per reigon
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Fastly Edge Cloud PlatformHAProxy Community Edition
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Fastly Edge Cloud PlatformHAProxy Community Edition
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Fastly Edge Cloud PlatformHAProxy Community Edition
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.5 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.5 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Score 8.1 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Fastly Edge Cloud PlatformHAProxy Community Edition
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(4 ratings)
9.0
(7 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Fastly Edge Cloud PlatformHAProxy Community Edition
Likelihood to Recommend
Fastly
The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.
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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.
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Pros
Fastly
  • Very performant and fast -- major companies have drastically reduced page load times with Fastly's edge technology.
  • Support for many types of media, including video.
  • Image add-on makes serving and manipulating images very simple.
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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
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Cons
Fastly
  • WAF is hard to configure.
  • No comprehensive rate limiting without a pricey upgrade.
  • Account access controls are extremely limited.
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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.
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Usability
Fastly
Fastly Edge Cloud Platform is a powerful tool with robust capabilities, but it requires deep technical knowledge to integrate effectively into existing applications. While its performance and features are excellent, the lack of a user-friendly interface and the need for advanced configuration can make it challenging for teams without experienced developers.
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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
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Support Rating
Fastly
No answers on this topic
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Fastly
It’s the fastest and most configurable.
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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.
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Return on Investment
Fastly
  • Fastly dramatically reduces load times for clients all over the world thanks to their global system of POPs.
  • Fastly is a cost-effective choice when a highly-performant CDN is required and makes it simple to support data that is quickly invalidated.
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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.
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ScreenShots