HAProxy Community Edition vs Pomerium
HAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.org
Pomerium
pomerium.comSide by side
| Figure | HAProxy Community Edition | Pomerium |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $7/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 9 |
| Spec score · Reverse Proxy Software | 8.8 (#5) | 8.9 (#3) |
| Documentation depth | Project documentation includes introduction, configuration, Lua, SPOE, management, peers, testing, networking namespaces, and developer internals material. | Documentation includes fundamentals courses, deployment guides, configuration reference, API reference, integrations and troubleshooting material. |
| Founded | HAProxy Technologies is listed as founded in 2013. | Pomerium's company history records its founding in 2019 by Bobby, who wrote the original code. |
| Integrations | The 3.4 release notes list an OpenTelemetry filter and ACME certificate features including DNS-01 challenges. | Listed integrations include Grafana, Kubernetes, Okta, Cloud Run, Docker, Google Kubernetes Engine, FleetDM, BambooHR, Auth0, Azure Active Directory, GitHub, GitLab, Google Workspace, OneLogin, OpenID Connect, and Ping Identity. |
| Limit: learning curve | G2 identifies a steep learning curve caused by HAProxy's broad configuration options. | G2 reviewers mention a steep learning curve and complexity for newcomers configuring the many available options. |
| Protocols | The project supports TCP and HTTP-based applications, and its listed recent versions include QUIC and HTTP/3 features. | The product site lists HTTP, MCP, SSH, gRPC, TCP and UDP access patterns. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.7 out of 5 from 914 reviews | 4.8 out of 5 from 12 reviews. |
| Self-hosting | HAProxy is built and installed from source with GNU Make on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, macOS, Cygwin, and other targets. | Pomerium Core is the self-managed server and data plane, installable from binaries, OS packages, Docker images or source. |
| Support | The project points users to commercial support contracts and professional services from HAProxy Technologies. | The pricing page lists community forum, email support, dedicated Slack channel, phone support, and dedicated customer success manager options. |
| What it does | HAProxy is free, high-performance software for reverse proxying, high availability, and load balancing TCP and HTTP applications. | Pomerium is an identity-aware reverse proxy that provides application and service access without a traditional VPN or client software. |
Plans
HAProxy Community Edition
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy EnterprisePriced on request
Pomerium
- Personal FreeFree
- Business$7 a month
- Zero PersonalFree
- Zero PersonalFree
- Zero Business$7 a month
- Zero Business (annual)$7 a month
- Zero Business (monthly)$9 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- 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.
Pomerium
Pomerium is an open-source identity-aware proxy for controlling access to internal applications, servers, services, and workloads without requiring VPN client software. It checks identity, device state, and request context before granting access, and authenticates through identity providers that support OpenID Connect. Listed access scenarios include HTTP, MCP, SSH, gRPC, TCP, and UDP; supported app protocols also include HTTPS, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and WebSocket. Pomerium removes its authentication cookies before forwarding requests upstream, and sensitive databroker data is encrypted at rest. Downstream TLS has a minimum of TLS 1.2. Deployment options include Linux and macOS binaries, packages, Docker images, source builds, and desktop clients for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The free Personal plan lists 10 users, 10 routes, five policies, and two service accounts. Business costs $7.00 per month, billed annually, and lists limits of 1,000 users, 100 routes, 100 policies, and 20 service accounts. A free trial is also listed.