HAProxy Community Edition vs. NGINX vs. TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HAProxy Community Edition
Score 9.3 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
Score 9.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
ActiveMatrix Service Grid is an SOA governance and application server, from TIBCO.N/A
Pricing
HAProxy Community EditionNGINXTIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HAProxy Community EditionNGINXTIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
Free Trial
NoYesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HAProxy Community EditionNGINXTIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
Considered Multiple Products
HAProxy Community Edition
Chose HAProxy Community Edition
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, …
NGINX
Chose NGINX
Nginx's cache mechanism is better than Apache and HAProxy. Also Nginx is very light weight and works for multiple sites with much less work. i.e. As front end proxy server configuration is very easy as compared to other applications. Apache sometimes crashes and is not able to …
Chose NGINX
NetApp, f1, etc., [I've] used them all. I find using commodity hardware across diverse endpoints running software solutions is cheaper while being more available than individual hardware solutions. and I find Nginx to be the best proxy solution that can do everything we need.
Chose NGINX
As I mentioned before, I'd chose Nginx over HAProxy any day. It's just simpler to use, has more features and less quirks.
TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid

No answer on this topic

Features
HAProxy Community EditionNGINXTIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
HAProxy Community Edition
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.8
43 Ratings
10% above category average
TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
-
Ratings
IDE support00 Ratings8.127 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.638 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.939 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings9.139 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.040 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings9.037 Ratings00 Ratings
SOA Governance
Comparison of SOA Governance features of Product A and Product B
HAProxy Community Edition
-
Ratings
NGINX
-
Ratings
TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
5.8
1 Ratings
14% below category average
Service registry00 Ratings00 Ratings5.01 Ratings
Service management00 Ratings00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Service discovery00 Ratings00 Ratings6.01 Ratings
Dependency management00 Ratings00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Policy management00 Ratings00 Ratings4.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
HAProxy Community EditionNGINXTIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 7.9 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 7.9 out of 10
Oracle SOA Suite
Oracle SOA Suite
Score 8.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HAProxy Community EditionNGINXTIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(7 ratings)
9.3
(72 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.3
(25 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(2 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
HAProxy Community EditionNGINXTIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid
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
Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
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Cloud Software Group
It fits perfectly for SOA and EAI architecture with large numbers of services that required to be wired to each other, the binding virtualization is quite good to simply this part. For the simple scenario of orchestration and /or ESB architecture could be a better use traditional stack.
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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
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
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Cloud Software Group
  • reduce the number of http port required by services
  • simplified the binding connection amongst services
  • high scalability and fast deployment of applications
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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.
Read full review
F5
  • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
  • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
  • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
  • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
  • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
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Cloud Software Group
  • health check of services and application features has been released with a lot of bugs that have never been fixed
  • it is not so simple to apply the security policy to service/reference binding
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Likelihood to Renew
Open Source
No answers on this topic
F5
Great value for the product
Read full review
Cloud Software Group
No answers on this topic
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
This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers
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Cloud Software Group
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.
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F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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Cloud Software Group
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.
Read full review
F5
I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
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Cloud Software Group
TIBCO service grid has been chosen as a natural selection of the TIBCO product evolution. The high flexibility and the binding virtualization fits very well with client needs for its EAI applications due to the huge number of services and applications, the management of application dependencies during deployment, the advantage of perfect integration with EMS for logging
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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
  • By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
  • Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
  • Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
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Cloud Software Group
  • The integration of old BW with BWSE and its interface quite similar to design time has reduced the cost of training for developers
  • The TIBCO support for this product is no the best and clients complains too much about this. This required to find a workaround or force the client to move to new/or different product. Huge impact on ROI
Read full review
ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration