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Envoy vs HAProxy comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Envoy
Ranking in Service Mesh
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HAProxy
Ranking in Service Mesh
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (2nd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (13th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (6th), Bot Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of Envoy is 12.8%, down from 22.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 10.4%, down from 14.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Service Mesh Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HAProxy10.4%
Envoy12.8%
Other76.8%
Service Mesh
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Full-stack Developer at ImageVision.ai
A simple solution that works as a proxy server and load balancer
I used the solution to build a project's proxy server and load balancer I found Envoy simple to use compared to alternatives like Traefik. The tool needs to incorporate better documentation and more example samples.  I haven't contacted the tool's support team.  I chose Envoy for the POC…
Shrinivas Devarkonda - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of DevOps at TripFactory
Handles high traffic efficiently and simplifies complex routing with rule-based logic
I think HAProxy is good as it stands now, but I believe there could be improvements. gRPC has recently been implemented, which is great, along with TLS 1.2 and 1.3 support, and HTTP 2.0 is also available. However, I'm unsure about the benchmark of those HTTP 2.0 requests on HAProxy. If there were any other protocol with better performance than HTTP 2.0, or perhaps mTLS and other similar features, including that in HAProxy would be really great. For improvements, I think that during setup and configuration, the steps provided are neat and clear. Anyone can easily install and configure it. There are many kernel tuning parameters also available, which is great. For specific improvement, in terms of logging, I think printing the full object of the request may help, or if there's a way to reference two requests, it would be beneficial to find a complete session history from a logged-in customer, as it would help analyze customer and user analytics.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I found Envoy simple to use compared to alternatives like Traefik."
"Overall, it's a good solution."
"HAProxy positively impacted our organization by exceeding scalability expectations, initially projected at 200k requests but ultimately handling over 15 million transactions per second without any issues."
"The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."
"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"Advanced traffic rules, including stick tables and ACLs, which allow me to shape traffic while it's load balanced."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to incorporate better documentation and more example samples."
"The documentation is extremely detailed, but I think it could be restructured so it isn't so daunting for beginners."
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration."
"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit."
"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."
"An alerting system would be better as I need to check log files if any backend is down."
"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is open-source."
"I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license."
"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."
"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."
"Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes."
"The tool is open-source."
"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."
"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible​."
"I use the open-source version of the product. I don't have experience with the licensed version of the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Educational Organization
9%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Do you recommend HAProxy?
I do recommend HAProxy for more simple applications or for companies with a low budget, since HAProxy is a free, open-source product. HAProxy is also a good choice for someone looking for a stable ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?
Since we used the open-source version, we were not concerned about pricing, setup cost, or licensing.
What needs improvement with HAProxy?
For the limited use that I have of HAProxy, I don't have any points to improve. I think I need more time with this tool, or perhaps I simply don't have areas that need to get better. I don't have a...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Booking.com, Cookpad, Digital Ocean, Ebay, F5, Google, GO-JEK, Grubhub, IBM, Medium, Microsoft, Netflix, Pinterest, Salesforce.com, Snapchat, Stripe, Square, Tencent, Twilio, Uber, Verizon, VMware, Vsco, Yahoo Japan, Yelp
Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp
Find out what your peers are saying about Traefik Labs, HAProxy, Isito and others in Service Mesh. Updated: October 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.