HAProxy Community Edition vs Pound
HAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.orgPound
github.comSide by side
| Figure | HAProxy Community Edition | Pound |
|---|---|---|
| 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 · Reverse Proxy Software | 8.8 (#5) | 7.1 (#25) |
| Dynamic backends | HAProxy 3.4 added CLI operations to create, populate, publish, and delete backends without reloads. | Optional DNS-based dynamic backends can be built using GNU adns when that library is available. |
| Integrations | The 3.4 release notes list an OpenTelemetry filter and ACME certificate features including DNS-01 challenges. | Optional build support includes Lua extensions, DNS-based dynamic backends, and Perl-compatible regular expressions through PCRE or PCRE2. |
| Purpose | HAProxy is a free, fast reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP applications. | Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTPS front end for web servers. |
| Security | Listed defensive measures include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, and checks for impossible states. | The project describes Pound as a small program that can run setuid/setgid or in a chroot jail and does not access the hard disk except to read certificate files at startup when required. |
| Support | The project points users to commercial support contracts and professional services from HAProxy Technologies. | The maintainer directs bug reports to email addresses [email protected] and [email protected] or the GitHub issue tracker. |
| What it does | HAProxy is free, high-performance software for reverse proxying, high availability, and load balancing TCP and HTTP applications. | Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTPS front-end for web servers. |
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.