HAProxy Community Edition vs. NGINX Plus

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
NGINX Plus
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
NGINX Plus is presented as a cloud‑native, easy-to-use reverse proxy, load balancer, and API gateway, from F5.
$849
per month billed annually
Pricing
HAProxy Community EditionNGINX Plus
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Team
$849
per month billed annually
Advanced
$2,099
per month billed annually
Enterprise
Tiered Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HAProxy Community EditionNGINX Plus
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HAProxy Community EditionNGINX Plus
Top Pros

No answers on this topic

Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Features
HAProxy Community EditionNGINX Plus
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
HAProxy Community Edition
-
Ratings
NGINX Plus
8.1
5 Ratings
1% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings7.93 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.23 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings7.94 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.23 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings8.14 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings8.54 Ratings
Best Alternatives
HAProxy Community EditionNGINX Plus
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HAProxy Community EditionNGINX Plus
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(7 ratings)
8.7
(5 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(2 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(2 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
HAProxy Community EditionNGINX Plus
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.
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F5
Makes our life easy as application admins in securing our applications and making them accessible. We can easily add an application within a few minutes and define the backend servers right away.
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
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F5
  • Load balancing
  • Caching
  • App security
  • Boost App performance
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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.
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F5
  • Update full config via api
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Likelihood to Renew
Open Source
No answers on this topic
F5
No reason not to renew it, we are happy with it.
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
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F5
It's been great for us for 3+ years now.
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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.
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F5
We had an issue after upgrading from RHEL 7 to 8, and there were some issues that the security team imposed upon the platform with a scanning tool. We also had a VXLAN environment that was not properly sending a gratuitous arp to the network. NGINX support was instrumental to speedily resolving our issue.
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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.
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F5
The API and dashboard alone make NGINX Plus a better choice.
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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.
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F5
  • More uptime for business critical applications
  • Less overhead for administrator to maintain the applications
Read full review
ScreenShots