Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Haproxy VS Envoy Proxy

Compare Haproxy VS Envoy Proxy and see what are their differences

Haproxy logo Haproxy

Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

Envoy Proxy logo Envoy Proxy

Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy, designed for cloud-native applications
  • Haproxy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-19
  • Envoy Proxy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-02-09

Haproxy features and specs

  • High Performance
    HAProxy is known for its high efficiency and low latency, making it suitable for handling a large amount of traffic with minimal overhead.
  • Reliability
    The software is robust and stable, having been battle-tested in numerous large-scale environments, ensuring reliable performance under heavy loads.
  • Flexibility
    HAProxy supports a wide range of configurations, allowing it to be used in various scenarios, from simple load balancing to complex traffic routing.
  • Scalability
    With HAProxy, you can easily scale out your infrastructure by distributing the traffic across multiple servers, ensuring better resource utilization.
  • Health Checking
    HAProxy provides powerful health check mechanisms to monitor the status of backend servers and automatically remove unhealthy servers from the pool.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project, HAProxy is free to use and has a community of contributors that help improve and maintain the software continuously.
  • SSL Termination
    HAProxy supports SSL termination, which can offload the SSL decryption process from backend servers, improving overall performance.
  • Logging and Monitoring
    HAProxy offers comprehensive logging and monitoring features that allow administrators to gain insights into traffic patterns and server health.

Possible disadvantages of Haproxy

  • Complex Configuration
    Setting up HAProxy can be complex and may require a deep understanding of its configuration syntax and options, particularly for advanced use cases.
  • Lack of Built-in GUI
    HAProxy does not come with a built-in graphical user interface (GUI), which can make management more difficult for users who prefer visual tools over command-line interfaces.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    For beginners, the learning curve can be steep due to the advanced features and extensive configuration options provided by HAProxy.
  • Limited Application Layer Features
    While HAProxy excels at load balancing and basic traffic management, it lacks some application layer features that specialized application delivery controllers (ADCs) might offer.
  • Resource Intensive
    In certain high-traffic scenarios, HAProxy may consume significant CPU and memory resources, potentially requiring hardware upgrades.

Envoy Proxy features and specs

  • High Performance
    Envoy Proxy is designed for high-performance communication across microservices, offering efficient proxying, low latency, and support for high throughput.
  • Extensibility
    Envoy supports a wide range of filters and extensions that allow you to customize its behavior easily, accommodating diverse use cases.
  • Observability
    It provides comprehensive observability features, including distributed tracing, metrics, and logging, which help in monitoring and debugging traffic issues.
  • Service Discovery
    Envoy seamlessly integrates with service discovery systems, automatically adjusting to changes in the environment without requiring manual intervention.
  • Resilience
    Built-in resilience features like retries, circuit breakers, and timeout management enhance Envoy's robustness in unreliable network environments.
  • Protocol Agnostic
    Envoy supports various communication protocols, which helps in managing HTTP1, HTTP2, gRPC, TCP, and WebSockets in a single binary.

Possible disadvantages of Envoy Proxy

  • Complex Configuration
    The configuration files in Envoy can become complex and challenging to manage, which may require steep learning curves for new users.
  • Resource Intensive
    Envoy can be resource-intensive, especially when handling a high number of connections or processing large volumes of data.
  • Limited GUI Tools
    Compared to other solutions, Envoy lacks comprehensive graphical user interface tools for monitoring and configuration management.
  • Community and Ecosystem Maturity
    While Envoy has an active community, some organizations may find the maturity of its ecosystem lacking compared to longer-established options.
  • Version Compatibility
    Keeping Envoy and its dependencies up to date can be challenging, especially in environments with fast-paced development cycles.

Analysis of Haproxy

Overall verdict

  • Yes, HAProxy is considered good by many industry professionals due to its robustness, scalability, and flexibility. It is often used in production environments to ensure high availability and efficient distribution of network traffic.

Why this product is good

  • HAProxy is widely regarded as a highly reliable and efficient load balancer and proxy server. Its popularity stems from its ability to provide high availability, performance, and security. It is open-source, which allows for customization and wide adoption in various environments. HAProxy supports TCP and HTTP-based applications, making it versatile for different types of workloads.

Recommended for

  • Websites and applications with a high volume of traffic requiring load balancing
  • Organizations in need of reliable SSL termination and offloading
  • Businesses seeking enhanced security features like rate limiting, connection limiting, and DDoS protection
  • Teams that need a customizable and scriptable solution to fit complex network requirements

Haproxy videos

HAProxy Crash Course (TLS 1.3, HTTPS, HTTP/2 and more)

More videos:

  • Review - HAPROXY vs NGINX - 10,000 requests while killing servers
  • Tutorial - How To Setup ACME, Let's Encrypt, and HAProxy HTTPS offloading on pfsense

Envoy Proxy videos

Webinar: Using Envoy Proxy as Your Gateway to Service Mesh

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Haproxy and Envoy Proxy)
Web Servers
88 88%
12% 12
Web And Application Servers
Network & Admin
90 90%
10% 10
Load Balancers
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Haproxy and Envoy Proxy

Haproxy Reviews

Top 5 Open Source Load Balancers in 2024
Widely regarded as a stalwart in the open source community, HAProxy has evolved into a versatile and powerful load balancing solution. HAProxy stands as a silent sentinel, orchestrating the seamless flow of data for some of the world's most visited websites. As a free, exceptionally fast, and reliable reverse-proxy, HAProxy is not just a load balancer; it's a digital maestro...
10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers
HAProxy is an L4 and L7 load balancer supporting TCP and UDP traffic. It’s a well-established, open source solution used by companies such as Airbnb and GitHub. HAProxy is also a very capable L7 load balancer, supporting HTTP/2 and gRPC backends. Thanks to its long history, large community, and reliable nature, HAProxy has become the de facto open source load balancer—it...
10 Open Source Load Balancer for HA and Improved Performance
One of the popular ones out there in the market is to provide high availability, proxy, TCP/HTTP load-balancing. HAProxy is used by some of the reputed brands in the world, like below.
Source: geekflare.com
Top 5 Open-Source Load Balancers 2021
HAProxy provides many distinct features such as it processes an enormous number of tasks in a millisecond, offers minimal cost for context switch and memory usage, ability to instantly detect a threat or event on tens of thousands of connections, efficient use of the CPU cycles, and memory bandwidth, optimized timer queue, optimized HTTP header analysis, GZip Compression,...
Source: linuxways.net
The 5 Best Open Source Load Balancers
HAProxy is another common name in the web ecosystem. HAProxy offers reverse proxying and load balancing of TCP and HTTP traffic. When you choose HAProxy, you’re choosing a high-performance, well-established solution.
Source: logz.io

Envoy Proxy Reviews

We have no reviews of Envoy Proxy yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Envoy Proxy might be a bit more popular than Haproxy. We know about 2 links to it since March 2021 and only 2 links to Haproxy. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Haproxy mentions (2)

  • HA Proxy For MySQL Master – Slave
    Root@haproxy01:~# haproxy -v HA-Proxy version 2.0.13-2ubuntu0.3 2021/08/27 - https://haproxy.org/ How to Install it? You simply use yum or apt commands to install it Sudo apt install -y haproxy. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • cannot get haproxy / mjpeg streamer to play nice together
    HA-Proxy version 2.2.9-2+deb11u3 2022/03/10 - https://haproxy.org/ maxconn 4096 user haproxy group haproxy daemon log 127.0.0.1 local0 debug Defaults log global mode http option httplog option dontlognull retries 3 option redispatch option http-server-close option forwardfor maxconn 2000 ... Source: about 3 years ago

Envoy Proxy mentions (2)

  • gRPC vs REST: Comparing API Styles in Practice
    But what if we could make some changes to enable clients to interact with our gRPC API as though it were a REST service? Our service won't be RESTful since it will still be RPC under the covers, but we will get to access it via HTTP/1.1, URLs, and JSON. Thankfully, we can use an Envoy proxy server to easily accomplish this feat without having to write our own code manually! - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • SSL Termination before Postgres - is it possible?
    Have a look at Envoy (https://envoyproxy.io) and the Postgres filter (https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/v1.19.0/configuration/listeners/network_filters/postgres_proxy_filter) and StartTLS filter (see https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/v1.19.0/api-v3/extensions/filters/network/postgres_proxy/v3alpha/postgres_proxy.proto.html how to use it). Source: almost 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Haproxy and Envoy Proxy, you can also consider the following products

nginx - A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.

Traefik - Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

SKUDONET - Scale easy and avoid system disruptions with the ADC challengers through high availability, load balancing, security and high performance.

gobetween - Modern & minimalistic load balancer and router for the Cloud era

AWS Elastic Load Balancing - Amazon ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud.

Ocelot - Application and Data, Build, Test, Deploy, and Microservices Tools