TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

HAProxy Community Edition vs. Azure Front Door

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    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

    Azure Front Door

    Score6.8 out of 10
    N/AAzure Front Door is a cloud content delivery network (CDN) service that helps users deliver high performance, scalability, and a secure user experiences for content and applications. It includes a customizable rules engine for advanced routing capabilities. It boasts instant scalability with global HTTP load balancing and failover.

    $35

    per month

    Pricing
    HAProxy Community EditionAzure Front Door
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Standard
    $35
    per month
    Premium
    $330
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    HAProxy Community EditionAzure Front Door
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Base fees (Billed hourly and only for number of hours used)​
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    HAProxy Community EditionAzure Front Door
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Amazon CloudFront
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Google Cloud CDN
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Azure CDN
    Score7.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    HAProxy Community EditionAzure Front Door
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.7
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    HAProxy Community EditionAzure Front Door
    Likelihood to Recommend
    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
    Microsoft
    Azure Front Door is very easy and fast to set up and implement, if you are looking for an easy solution that is secure and reliable, Front Door does all that and can be configured in a few hours. AFD is a CDN with WAF, accordingly, it is well suited for any CDN Scenario, other providers such as Akamai or Verizon have a more expensive base price and are harder to manage/configure, Front Door is simple, easy, and provides what's needed when it comes to Web App Security. If you have multiple data centers, have apps in different regions, or targeting a global audience, AFD is an excellent option to get up to speed quickly. If you are looking for more features and capabilities, or planning a very complex setup, Front Door might be sufficient, but other specialized provides such as Imperva, Cloudflare or Akamai are generally a bit more advanced (but harder to set up and maintain). It always depends on the scenario, but for us, Front Door was an excellent option and served us very well with no issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    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
    Microsoft
    • Content delivery across all continents
    • Web & media acceleration
    • Web application firewall
    • Backend geo-availability
    • Reporting & access metrics
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    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
    Microsoft
    • Better control over origin caching
    • Hierarchal Management UI instead of distributed management
    • TLS & Cipher Control
    • Faster publishing or change updates
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    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
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    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
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including Akamai, Verizon, and Cloudflare. They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other providers were much harder to configure and maintain and their overall cost was higher than AFD. For example, Verizon was great, performance was excellent, but reporting/logging was not up to our expectations, and we had many issues with its Rules Engine. AFD is great for delivering your web apps globally quickly and easily, the cost is reasonable and comes with very little operational overhead, the logging and reporting capabilities are very good, additionally, its integration with Azure Cloud Services gives it an advantage over other competitors.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    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
    Microsoft
    • AFD implementation was approx. 80% cheaper than other providers, from initiation to operation.
    • It allowed us to minimize backend resources size/processing power, taking all the load from client requests, cutting tens of thousands of dollars monthly on compute, memory, and network bandwidth.
    • Overall, the ROI of AFD is very quick, it is not an expensive solution, therefore, its ROI goals are easy to calculate and achieve, our overall ROI exceeded 300%.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots