HAProxy Community Edition vs ngrok
HAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.org
ngrok
ngrok.comSide by side
| Figure | HAProxy Community Edition | ngrok |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $10/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 4 |
| Spec score · Reverse Proxy Software | 8.8 (#5) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Documentation depth | Project documentation includes introduction, configuration, Lua, SPOE, management, peers, testing, networking namespaces, and developer internals material. | The documentation includes quickstarts, conceptual guides, examples, Traffic Policy recipes and API reference pages. |
| Founded | HAProxy Technologies is listed as founded in 2013. | 2015 |
| Headquarters | Newton, Massachusetts, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Integrations | The 3.4 release notes list an OpenTelemetry filter and ACME certificate features including DNS-01 challenges. | Official documentation lists SDKs for Python, Go, Node and Rust and integrations including Okta SSO, Microsoft Entra ID and Datadog. |
| Licence | The main program is GPL version 2 or later, while its headers use LGPL 2.1. | The hosted ngrok service is proprietary under its terms, while several official SDK, Terraform and operator repositories are MIT licensed. |
| Load balancing | It balances TCP connections or HTTP requests across backend servers. | Endpoint pooling load-balances traffic across multiple agents and can fail over to healthy backends. |
| Protocols | The project supports TCP and HTTP-based applications, and its listed recent versions include QUIC and HTTP/3 features. | ngrok supports HTTP, TLS, and TCP, including WebSockets, gRPC, SSH, Postgres, MQTT, and Minecraft traffic. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.7 out of 5 from 914 reviews | 4.2 out of 5 from 15 reviews |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 9.3 out of 10 from 21 reviews | 0 out of 10 from 0 reviews |
| Support | The project points users to commercial support contracts and professional services from HAProxy Technologies. | Paid support options include Dedicated On-Call with an 8 business hour SLA, plus Slack or Teams and 24×7 paging add-ons. |
| What it does | HAProxy is free, high-performance software for reverse proxying, high availability, and load balancing TCP and HTTP applications. | ngrok is developer infrastructure that routes and secures traffic to applications, APIs and AI models. |
Plans
HAProxy Community Edition
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy EnterprisePriced on request
ngrok
- FreeFree
- Hobbyist$10 a month
- Pay-as-you-go$20 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
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.
ngrok
ngrok is a cloud networking platform that secures, transforms, and routes traffic to services wherever they run. Its agent sends traffic through secure tunnels without requiring firewall changes. Traffic Policy uses CEL-based rules to route requests, authenticate them, apply rate limits or web application firewall controls, and reject them. Supported traffic includes HTTP, TLS, and TCP, including WebSockets, gRPC, SSH, Postgres, MQTT, and Minecraft. The Integrations Hub offers integrations and guides for areas such as SSO, databases, Kubernetes, OAuth, webhooks, and web servers. ngrok also verifies webhook signatures for more than 70 providers, including Stripe, GitHub, Twilio, Slack, and Shopify. The free plan includes $5 one-time usage, up to 3 online endpoints, up to 1GB data transfer, up to 20k HTTP/S requests, and one team member. Paid access starts at $10/mo. On Hobbyist, endpoints stop working when usage credit runs out, until the billing cycle ends and credit resets. ngrok lists region pinning across the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific, Australia, India, Japan, and South America.