AWS Elastic Load Balancing vs HAProxy Community Edition
AWS Elastic Load Balancing
aws.amazon.comHAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.orgSide by side
| Figure | AWS Elastic Load Balancing | HAProxy Community Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 3 |
| Spec score · Load Balancing Software | 9.0 (#1) | 8.7 (#3) |
| Documentation depth | AWS publishes user guides for ALB, NLB, GWLB and Classic Load Balancer plus CLI references and API references. | Project documentation includes introduction, configuration, Lua, SPOE, management, peers, testing, networking namespaces, and developer internals material. |
| Integrations | Documented integrations include EC2, EC2 Auto Scaling, ACM, CloudWatch, ECS, Global Accelerator, Route 53 and AWS WAF. | The 3.4 release notes list an OpenTelemetry filter and ACME certificate features including DNS-01 challenges. |
| Licence | ELB is a proprietary managed AWS service; AWS grants only a limited service-use intellectual-property licence during the agreement term. | The main program is GPL version 2 or later, while its headers use LGPL 2.1. |
| Purpose | Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets and virtual appliances in one or more Availability Zones. | HAProxy is a free, fast reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP applications. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.5 out of 5 from 94 reviews | 4.7 out of 5 from 914 reviews |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.3 out of 5 from 118 ratings | 4.4 out of 5 from 11 reviews |
| Security | ELB supports SSL/TLS termination, certificate management, and client certificate authentication. | Listed defensive measures include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, and checks for impossible states. |
| What it does | Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses and virtual appliances in one or more Availability Zones, routing requests to healthy targets. | HAProxy is free, high-performance software for reverse proxying, high availability, and load balancing TCP and HTTP applications. |
Plans
AWS Elastic Load Balancing
- AWS Free TierFree
- Pay-as-you-go — Application Load BalancerPrice not published
- Pay-as-you-go — Classic Load BalancerPrice not published
- Pay-as-you-go — Gateway Load BalancerPrice not published
- Pay-as-you-go — Network Load BalancerPrice not published
HAProxy Community Edition
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
AWS Elastic Load Balancing
AWS Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming application traffic across targets and virtual appliances in one or more Availability Zones. It offers Application, Network, Gateway, and Classic Load Balancers, scales request handling with traffic, and runs configurable health checks on targets. Application Load Balancers support HTTP header-based routing, redirects, fixed responses, HTTP/2, and gRPC. Network Load Balancers support static Elastic IP addresses and AWS PrivateLink for TCP and TLS listeners. The service also supports SSL/TLS termination, certificate management, and client certificate authentication. CloudWatch metrics and logging are available for all four types. A single load balancer can distribute traffic across AWS and on-premises resources. Kubernetes support includes direct-to-pod routing for Application Load Balancers and private EKS clusters for Application and Network Load Balancers. AWS recommends different types for HTTP, transport protocols, third-party virtual appliances, and EC2-Classic applications. Usage charges vary by region; data transfer and public IPv4 address charges may be additional. New AWS customers receive a free tier for six months after account creation, with usage limits and up to $200 in credits.
HAProxy Community Edition
HAProxy Community Edition is free, self-hosted software for proxying TCP and HTTP applications, with high availability and load balancing. It is aimed especially at very high-traffic websites. HAProxy runs on Linux, where it is included with most mainstream distributions and is often deployed by default on cloud platforms. Its event-driven design uses light multithreading on SMP machines. The project lists Layer 4 and Layer 7 routing and TLS termination, along with TCP and HTTP support; recent versions also include QUIC and HTTP/3 features. Listed safeguards include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, and checks for impossible states. The site reports up to 2 million SSL requests per second and 100 Gbps of forwarded traffic on AWS Graviton2. HAProxy 3.4 is in development, and 3.4.6 is the latest listed release in that branch. Its features include dynamic backends, HTTP/2 flood protections, ACME improvements, experimental QMUX, and an OpenTelemetry filter. LTS branches receive five years of maintenance; other stable branches receive 12 to 18 months.