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Instead of HAProxy Community Edition

HAProxy Community Edition alternatives

HAProxy Community Edition is a free, self-hosted Linux reverse proxy for TCP and HTTP applications. It combines Layer 4 and Layer 7 routing, TLS termination, high availability, and load balancing, with an event-driven design and light multithreading. The project targets very high-traffic websites and reports handling up to 2 million SSL requests per second and 100 Gbps of forwarded traffic on AWS Graviton2. Recent releases add dynamic backends, HTTP/2 flood protections, ACME improvements, QUIC and HTTP/3 features, and an OpenTelemetry filter. Security controls include chroot, privilege drops, fork prevention, and strict protocol validation.

1. 1 F

   Fabio

   Free plan LinuxMacSelf-hosted+1

   Consul-driven HTTP and TCP service routing — Fabio updates HTTP and TCP routes from Consul changes and adds traffic shaping, redirects, access controls, and dynamic certificate stores.

   Open source Visit site
2. 2 F

   freenginx

   Free plan LinuxMacSelf-hosted+1

   HTTP, mail, TCP, and UDP proxying — freenginx adds static serving, cached reverse proxying, mail protocols, generic UDP proxying, and HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support.

   Free plan Visit site
3. 3 F

   frp

   Free plan AndroidLinuxMac+2

   Exposing intranet services through public nodes — frp creates reverse-proxy tunnels for private services, with QUIC, KCP, WebSocket, P2P hole punching, dashboards, and proxy-group load balancing.

   Free plan Visit site
4. 4 L

   LocalXpose

   Free plan LinuxMacSelf-hosted+2

   Sharing localhost services and webhook traffic — LocalXpose provides managed secure tunnels, desktop and CLI interfaces, traffic inspection, webhook replay, custom domains, and automatic Let's Encrypt certificates.

   Free plan · paid from $8/mo Visit site
5. 5

   ngrok

   Free plan APILinuxMac+3

   Cloud tunnels and policy-based routing — ngrok routes secure tunnels through a cloud platform and adds CEL traffic policies, WAF controls, broad integrations, and webhook verification.

   Free plan · paid from $10/mo Visit site
6. 6 O

   Openport

   Free plan APILinuxMac+2

   Remote access to ports and IoT fleets — Openport exposes local TCP ports through global secure tunnels and adds web/API IoT fleet management, groups, and HTTP forwarding.

   Free plan · paid from $1/mo · 30-day trial Visit site
7. 7

   Pomerium

   Free plan Open source APILinuxMac+3

   Zero-trust access to internal applications — Pomerium adds identity-, device-, and context-aware authorization, clientless access, OpenID Connect SSO, and cookie stripping across many protocols.

   Free plan · paid from $7/user/mo (annual) Visit site
8. 8

   AWS Elastic Load Balancing

   Free plan APILinuxMac+3
   7.6 Visit site
9. 9 L

   Linux Virtual Server

   Free plan LinuxSelf-hosted
   6.9 Free plan Visit site
10. 10 M

    MetalLB

    Free plan LinuxSelf-hosted
    6.9 Open source Visit site
11. 11

    kube-vip

    Free plan LinuxSelf-hosted
    6.7 Open source Visit site
12. 12

    PureLB

    Free plan LinuxMacSelf-hosted
    6.6 Open source Visit site
13. 13 A

    A10 Thunder ADC

    by A10 Thunder ADC

    Free trial APILinuxSelf-hosted
    6.5 Pricing on request Visit site
14. 14 O

    OpenELB

    Free plan LinuxSelf-hosted
    6.5 Free plan Visit site
15. 15

    Loadbalancer.org Enterprise

    Free trial APILinuxSelf-hosted+1
    6.1 From $150/mo · 30-day trial Visit site
16. 16 P

    Progress Kemp LoadMaster

    Free trial APILinuxSelf-hosted+2
    6.0 Free plan · 30-day trial Visit site
17. 17

    Citrix ADC (now NetScaler)

    Paid APILinuxSelf-hosted
    5.8 Pricing on request Visit site
18. 18 A

    Array APV

    Paid APILinuxSelf-hosted+1
    5.7 Pricing on request Visit site
19. 19 I

    IIS Application Request Routing (ARR)

    Free plan Windows
    5.7 Free plan Visit site
20. 20

    HAProxy Enterprise

    Paid APILinuxSelf-hosted
    5.6 Pricing on request Visit site
21. 21

    Google Cloud Load Balancing

    Paid APIWeb
    5.5 From $0.03 Visit site
22. 22

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DNS

    Paid APILinuxWeb
    5.4 From $1.11 Visit site
23. 23 R

    Radware Alteon

    by Radware Alteon

    Paid APILinuxSelf-hosted+1
    5.4 Pricing on request Visit site
24. 24 A

    Alibaba Cloud Server Load Balancer

    Paid Web
    4.9 From $0.01 Visit site
25. 25

    Cloudflare Load Balancing

    Paid Web
    4.9 From $5/mo Visit site
26. 26

    Azure Load Balancer

    Paid Web
    4.7 30-day trial Visit site
27. 27 B

    Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

    Paid Web
    4.6 Pricing on request Visit site
28. 28

    DigitalOcean Load Balancers

    Paid Web
    4.6 From $12/mo Visit site
29. 29 F

    F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager

    Paid
    4.4 Pricing on request Visit site
30. 30 H

    Hetzner Cloud Load Balancer

    Paid Web
    4.4 Visit site
31. 31 O

    OVHcloud Load Balancer

    Paid Web
    4.4 From $22.99/mo Visit site

Readers may look elsewhere when they need platforms beyond Linux and self-hosting, public-internet tunnels, identity-aware access, service discovery, or a graphical interface. HAProxy Community Edition is free, has no free trial, and is not a managed service, so operating it remains part of the deployment. Compare alternatives by checking whether they fit internal application access, exposing local services, Consul-driven routing, mail or UDP proxying, monitoring, authentication, and traffic controls. Also weigh platform coverage, tunnel or cloud dependencies, plan limits, and whether the alternative complements or replaces HAProxy's high-throughput proxy role.

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