Google Cloud Load Balancing vs HAProxy Community Edition
Google Cloud Load Balancing
cloud.google.comHAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.orgSide by side
| Figure | Google Cloud Load Balancing | HAProxy Community Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Load Balancing Software | 7.2 (#11) | 8.7 (#3) |
| Purpose | Cloud Load Balancing is a fully managed service that distributes traffic across apps for performance and resilience, scaling from zero to millions of users. | HAProxy is a free, fast reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP applications. |
| Support | Google Cloud support packages can include 24/7 coverage, phone support, and access to a technical support manager; community help is also available through Stack Overflow and Google Cloud Slack. | The project points users to commercial support contracts and professional services from HAProxy Technologies. |
Plans
HAProxy Community Edition
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Google Cloud Load Balancing
Google Cloud Load Balancing has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.