Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Haproxy VS nginx

Compare Haproxy VS nginx and see what are their differences

Haproxy logo Haproxy

Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

nginx logo nginx

A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.
  • Haproxy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-19
  • nginx Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-28

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.

nginx features and specs

  • High Performance
    Nginx is known for its ability to handle a large number of concurrent connections, which makes it an excellent choice for high-traffic websites.
  • Efficiency
    Nginx uses an event-driven architecture that can handle many connections in a single thread, making it resource-efficient.
  • Versatility
    Besides being a web server, Nginx can also function as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache, among other roles.
  • Security
    Nginx has robust security features including SSL/TLS support, which helps in protecting data transmitted between servers and clients.
  • Ease of Configuration
    Nginx's configuration syntax is considered straightforward and easier to understand compared to some alternatives like Apache.
  • Scalability
    Nginx can easily scale out by using multiple servers or CPUs, making it suitable for growing applications.
  • Low Memory Usage
    Its architecture allows for low-memory usage, which is beneficial for systems with limited resources.
  • Support for Multiple Protocols
    Nginx supports a variety of protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP.

Possible disadvantages of nginx

  • Learning Curve
    The configuration syntax, while considered simple by many, can still present a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Less Mature Ecosystem
    Compared to Apache, Nginx has fewer modules available, which can limit functionality for some specific use cases.
  • Less .htaccess Support
    Nginx does not support .htaccess files, which might be an inconvenience for users migrating from Apache who rely on this feature.
  • Error Logging
    Nginx's error logging is sometimes considered less user-friendly, making debugging and issue resolution more challenging.
  • Community Support
    While the community is growing, Nginx's user support community is still not as extensive as that of Apache.
  • Module Management
    Adding or removing modules in Nginx often requires recompiling the software, which can be inconvenient.

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

nginx videos

Nginx vs Apache Webservers: Main Differences

More videos:

  • Review - Nginx Web Hosting - 5 Best Nginx Reverse Proxy That Support Millions of Web Traffic!
  • Review - NGINX as a Reverse Proxy (listening on port 80)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Haproxy and nginx)
Web Servers
26 26%
74% 74
Web And Application Servers
Network & Admin
100 100%
0% 0
Application Server
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Haproxy and nginx. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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

nginx Reviews

Top 5 Open Source Load Balancers in 2024
While NGINX is renowned for its prowess as a web server, its load balancing capabilities are equally commendable. NGINX, also known as "engine x," stands as a multifaceted powerhouse, excelling as an HTTP and reverse proxy server, mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server. Originally crafted by Igor Sysoev, NGINX has a storied history, having long powered...
13 Best XAMPP Alternatives
Nginx is an open-source, high-performance web server used by tech companies, including Pinterest, Airbnb, Cloudflare, and Zendesk. It has been called the new Apache for its ability to scale more efficiently than other web servers, and many developers prefer it because it’s easy to deploy. Nginx also integrates with many programming languages via FastCGI.
Source: thetechtian.com
7 Best Containerization Software Solutions of 2022
If your enterprise is undergoing digital transformation, the NGINX application platform can help you modernize your legacy applications and deliver new microservices‑based applications – with performance, reliability, security, and scale.
Source: techgumb.com
Apache, IIS, NGINX, GWS : What’s Your Choice?
Utilizing a specific type of virtual or physical server determines the type of web server software you use. If you prefer Microsoft, then you will prefer to use IIS (Internet Information Services / Server) by Microsoft as your primary web server application solution. If you use Linux distribution, you have other alternatives like Apache, NGINX and LiteSpeed.
Source: www.milesweb.in
10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers
Nginx is a battle-tested piece of software written in C and initially introduced in 2004. Since then, it has grown to be an all-in-one reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. It offers L7 load balancing support for HTTP, HTTPS, FastCGI, uWSGI, SCGI, Memcached, and gRPC backends. Nginx’s process worker model is highly scalable and deployed at large scales in...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, nginx seems to be a lot more popular than Haproxy. While we know about 54 links to nginx, we've tracked only 2 mentions of 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 / over 2 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: over 2 years ago

nginx mentions (54)

View more

What are some alternatives?

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

Traefik - Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

Apache Tomcat - An open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies

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

Apache HTTP Server - Apache httpd has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996

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

Google Cloud Load Balancing - Google Cloud Load Balancer enables users to scale their applications on Google Compute Engine.