HAProxy Community Edition vs Piko
HAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.orgPiko
github.comSide by side
| Figure | HAProxy Community Edition | Piko |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 0 |
| Spec score · Reverse Proxy Software | 8.8 (#5) | 7.2 (#22) |
| Integrations | The 3.4 release notes list an OpenTelemetry filter and ACME certificate features including DNS-01 challenges. | Piko provides a Go SDK and documents hosting behind a Kubernetes Gateway or HTTP load balancer. |
| Load balancing | It balances TCP connections or HTTP requests across backend servers. | Requests are load balanced among available upstreams listening on the same endpoint. |
| Protocols | The project supports TCP and HTTP-based applications, and its listed recent versions include QUIC and HTTP/3 features. | Piko supports HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP traffic. |
| Purpose | HAProxy is a free, fast reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP applications. | Piko is an open-source reverse proxy for tunneling traffic to services that are not publicly routable. |
| Security | Listed defensive measures include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, and checks for impossible states. | The maker describes Piko as providing a secure way to connect to services that are not publicly routable, and documents TLS support for Piko forward. |
| Support | The project points users to commercial support contracts and professional services from HAProxy Technologies. | The project directs users to GitHub Discussions for questions, help, and ideas. |
| What it does | HAProxy is free, high-performance software for reverse proxying, high availability, and load balancing TCP and HTTP applications. | Piko is a reverse proxy that tunnels traffic to services that are not publicly routable. |
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.