AWS Elastic Load Balancing
7.2#2 in load balancing softwareFree planFree planWebAPILinuxmacOS
VisitAWS Elastic Load Balancing vs HAProxy Community Edition
HAProxy Community Edition
7.4#1 in load balancing softwareFree planFree planAPILinuxmacOSSelf-hosted
VisitWhat both publish
| Fact | AWS Elastic Load Balancing | HAProxy Community Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Documentation depth | AWS publishes user guides for ALB, NLB, GWLB and Classic Load Balancer plus CLI references and API references. | Project documentation includes introduction, configuration, Lua, SPOE, management, peers, testing, networking namespaces, and developer internals material. |
| Integrations | Documented integrations include EC2, EC2 Auto Scaling, ACM, CloudWatch, ECS, Global Accelerator, Route 53 and AWS WAF. | The 3.4 release notes list an OpenTelemetry filter and ACME certificate features including DNS-01 challenges. |
| Licence | ELB is a proprietary managed AWS service; AWS grants only a limited service-use intellectual-property licence during the agreement term. | The main program is GPL version 2 or later, while its headers use LGPL 2.1. |
| Purpose | Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets and virtual appliances in one or more Availability Zones. | HAProxy is a free, fast reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP applications. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.5 out of 5 from 94 reviews | 4.7 out of 5 from 914 reviews |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.3 out of 5 from 118 ratings | 4.4 out of 5 from 11 reviews |
| Security | ELB supports SSL/TLS termination, certificate management, and client certificate authentication. | Listed defensive measures include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, strict protocol validation, and checks for impossible states. |
AWS Elastic Load Balancing plans
- AWS Free TierFree
- Pay-as-you-go — Application Load Balancer—
- Pay-as-you-go — Classic Load Balancer—
- Pay-as-you-go — Gateway Load Balancer—
- Pay-as-you-go — Network Load Balancer—
HAProxy Community Edition plans
- HAProxy Community EditionFree
- HAProxy EnterprisePriced on request
Pick AWS Elastic Load Balancing if…
It suits teams distributing traffic across targets in AWS or on-premises environments, with load balancer types for HTTP, transport protocols, virtual appliances, and EC2-Classic applications. Kubernetes users may also find the listed controller support relevant.
Pick HAProxy Community Edition if…
HAProxy Community Edition suits Linux users who need a self-hosted proxy or load balancer for TCP and HTTP applications. Its stated focus on high traffic may interest operators of busy websites.