HAProxy Community Edition vs PureLB
HAProxy Community Edition
haproxy.org
PureLB
purelb.ioSide by side
| Figure | HAProxy Community Edition | PureLB |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 0 |
| Spec score · Load Balancing Software | 8.7 (#3) | 6.8 (#18) |
| Purpose | HAProxy is a free, fast reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP applications. | PureLB provides Kubernetes LoadBalancer services for bare-metal deployments by allocating IP addresses from configured pools and announcing them through Linux networking or optional BGP. |
| Security | Listed defensive measures include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, and checks for impossible states. | The allocator runs as non-root UID 65534 with a read-only filesystem, while the node agent and k8gobgp run as root with networking capabilities and host networking. |
| Support | The project points users to commercial support contracts and professional services from HAProxy Technologies. | The project lists its Kubernetes Slack #purelb-users channel and GitHub Issues as ways to get help. |
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.
PureLB
PureLB is a Kubernetes Service LoadBalancer for bare-metal Linux clusters. It allocates external IP addresses from configured pools and announces them through Linux networking, with optional BGP for remote addresses. ServiceGroups use exactly one pool type: local, remote, or Netbox. Local addresses are attached to host interfaces, and a Kubernetes Lease election chooses which node announces each address; another node can take over if that node fails. Remote addresses are placed on a dummy interface on every node and advertised through BGP, allowing an upstream router to distribute traffic with ECMP. Pools can contain IPv4, IPv6, or both for dual-stack deployments. Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions configure pools and node agents. Installation uses kubectl manifests or Helm, with Helm recommended for production. PureLB requires a Kubernetes cluster with an operational CNI and Linux nodes. It is free, open source, Apache 2.0 licensed, and self-hosted. Prometheus metrics are exposed on port 7472 at /metrics. NetBox integration is documented but currently unsupported and may not work with recent versions.