HAProxy Community Edition vs OpenELB
HAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.orgOpenELB
openelb.ioSide by side
| Figure | HAProxy Community Edition | OpenELB |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 0 |
| Spec score · Load Balancing Software | 8.7 (#3) | 6.9 (#16) |
| Integrations | The 3.4 release notes list an OpenTelemetry filter and ACME certificate features including DNS-01 challenges. | The project lists installation guides for Kubernetes, K3s and KubeSphere. |
| Purpose | HAProxy is a free, fast reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP applications. | OpenELB exposes Kubernetes LoadBalancer services to external access in bare-metal, edge, and virtualization environments. |
| Support | The project points users to commercial support contracts and professional services from HAProxy Technologies. | The project directs users to the KubeSphere Slack channel for support and discussion. |
Plans
HAProxy Community Edition
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy 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.
OpenELB
OpenELB exposes Kubernetes LoadBalancer services externally in bare-metal, edge, and virtualization environments. It assigns service addresses from Eip-managed IP pools and supports BGP, Layer 2, and VIP load-balancing modes. BGP mode uses GoBGP to publish routes to peer routers and supports ECMP, while BgpConf and BgpPeer custom resources configure BGP properties. Layer 2 mode requires infrastructure that permits anonymous ARP/NDP packets. VIP mode uses VRRP for high availability. OpenELB can be installed with kubectl manifests or Helm 3 in Kubernetes 1.15 or later, and guides are listed for Kubernetes, K3s, and KubeSphere. The project currently supports IPv4 only and is not a managed service. Layer 2 and VIP modes forward through one active node, so failover can briefly interrupt services and bandwidth is limited by that node. BGP requires a router supporting BGP and ECMP. OpenELB uses Apache License 2.0.