HAProxy Community Edition vs Openport

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.

Openport lets users make a local TCP port reachable from the internet without opening a firewall port. It builds a tunnel between a device and the outside world for remote access, and its web service and API can show online IoT devices and manage a fleet. Access can be controlled by user groups. The `--http-forward` option assigns a hostname to a session for serving a local port over HTTP and HTTPS with a valid certificate. Custom-domain forwarding requires a CNAME record and works over HTTPS only. With TLS passthrough, TLS ends on the user's machine, keeping tunnelled traffic encrypted end to end. Forwarded ports require visitors to click a token link by default; a clicked link remains valid for 24 hours. Openport also lists brute-force blocking and port-scanning detection. It supports API, Linux, macOS, web, and Windows. Since client 2.3.0, sessions can forward UDP as well as TCP on the same port when the server supports it. The service was founded in 2014 and offers a free plan, a 30-day trial, and paid plans from $1/mo.