A10 Thunder ADC vs HAProxy Enterprise
A10 Thunder ADC
a10networks.com
HAProxy Enterprise
haproxy.comSide by side
| Figure | A10 Thunder ADC | HAProxy Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Load Balancing Software | 8.7 (#2) | 7.4 (#10) |
| Availability | It distributes workloads across servers, evaluates application health, and supports global server load balancing across data centers and clouds. | The product page describes active-active failover and automated health checks, and states a 99.999% uptime capability. |
| Deployment | The product is offered as physical and SPE appliances, virtual appliances, bare metal, containers, and cloud deployments. | It can be deployed on-premises, in air-gapped, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments, and is packaged as software, a virtual appliance, or rack-mounted hardware. |
| Founded | 2004 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California, United States | Newton, Massachusetts, United States |
| Integrations | The product page names Terraform and Ansible for CI/CD integration, TKC and HashiCorp NIA with Consul for Kubernetes service discovery, and Prometheus/Grafana for monitoring. | The product page lists service discovery for Kubernetes, Consul, and Consul Enterprise; AWS and Azure deployment; and native Prometheus integrations. |
| Purpose | Thunder ADC is an application delivery controller and Layer 4–7 load balancer designed to protect critical applications, maintain server availability, and accelerate content delivery. | HAProxy Enterprise distributes incoming traffic across servers and continuously checks server health, rerouting requests when a server starts to fail. |
| Security | The product includes web and DNS firewall capabilities, single sign-on, DDoS protection, and support for advanced encryption including PFS and ECC. | Security features include a WAF, DDoS protection, bot management, global rate limiting, and mTLS encryption. |
| Support | A10 says its technical assistance center uses follow-the-sun support, and customers with a valid Thunder or AX Series support contract can download current software releases and receive product updates. | HAProxy advertises expert support available 24/7/365. |
Plans
In their own words
A10 Thunder ADC
A10 Thunder ADC is an application delivery controller and advanced load balancer for distributing workloads, maintaining server availability, protecting applications, and accelerating content delivery. It balances traffic at Layers 4–7, offers customizable service health checks, and supports aFleX scripting. Global Server Load Balancing can direct traffic across data centers and clouds for continuity and localized responses. Deployment options include hardware, virtual appliances, cloud, bare metal, and containers. Performance capabilities include caching, TCP optimization, and TLS/SSL offloading; security features include single sign-on, CAPTCHA, web and DNS firewalls, and DDoS protection. The REST-based aXAPI interface is described as providing 100% API coverage. Named integrations include Terraform and Ansible for CI/CD, Kubernetes service discovery through TKC or HashiCorp NIA with Consul, and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring. Pricing is on request. A 30-day trial license is listed for vThunder and public cloud offerings; container trial details require contacting A10 Sales. The container edition lists OpenShift 4.16 and minimum requirements of 4 vCPU and 16 GB memory.
HAProxy Enterprise
HAProxy Enterprise has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.