We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Istio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Service Mesh solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us."
"Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development."
"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"
"It is scalable."
"I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime."
"HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"The load balancing, service application, and monitoring of the life of the service are valuable features. We use it for authentication of call services, load balancing the calls among the service providers on service instances, and monitoring the health of the services."
"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"Improving the documentation with multiple examples and scenarios would be beneficial. Most users encounter similar situations, so having a variety of scenarios readily available on the tool's website would be helpful. For instance, if I were part of the HAProxy team, I'd create a webpage with different scenarios and provide files for each scenario. This way, users wouldn't have to start from scratch every time."
"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
"Documentation could be improved."
"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning."
"Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."
HAProxy is ranked 2nd in Service Mesh with 41 reviews while Istio is ranked 1st in Service Mesh with 6 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Istio is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Istio writes "Provides traffic management and its mutual TLS authentication helps control the access policies". HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler and Loadbalancer.org, whereas Istio is most compared with Kong Mesh, NGINX Service-Mesh, AWS App Mesh, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh and Envoy. See our HAProxy vs. Istio report.
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