Fabio vs HAProxy Community Edition
Fabio
github.comHAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.orgSide by side
| Figure | Fabio | HAProxy Community Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Reverse Proxy Software | 8.8 (#4) | 8.8 (#5) |
| Integrations | The project README says Fabio integrates with Consul, Vault, Amazon ELB, and Amazon API Gateway. | The 3.4 release notes list an OpenTelemetry filter and ACME certificate features including DNS-01 challenges. |
| Maintenance | The project site says primary maintenance has been the responsibility of Education Networks of America and the user community since January 2020. | Even-numbered LTS branches are maintained for five years, while odd-numbered stable branches are maintained for 12 to 18 months. |
| Purpose | Fabio is an HTTP and TCP reverse proxy that configures itself with data from Consul. | HAProxy is a free, fast reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP applications. |
| Security | The README says release hashes are signed with a PGP key and describes TLS certificate verification behavior for upstream HTTPS connections. | Listed defensive measures include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, and checks for impossible states. |
Plans
HAProxy Community Edition
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Fabio
Fabio is a self-hosted HTTP and TCP reverse proxy that builds its routing from Consul service data. Services can announce accepted paths with tags such as `urlprefix-/user`; Fabio then refreshes its routing table when Consul changes, without restarting or reloading. Its main role is distributing incoming HTTP(S) and TCP traffic from the internet to frontend services. It is not intended for frontend-to-backend or backend-to-backend routing, where Consul service discovery is used instead. Fabio provides route-specific access control, authorization, customizable logs, redirects, compression, header injection, path changes, WebSockets, server-sent events, and transparent gRPC proxying. It supports TLS termination, dynamic certificate stores, HTTPS upstreams, raw TCP, TCP-SNI forwarding, and traffic shaping by percentage. A web UI shows the active routes, with metrics integrations. Fabio is free, open-source software for Linux, macOS, and Windows, and requires Consul for service discovery.
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.