# HAProxy

24 Hacker News commenters recommended HAProxy and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Fast, stable load balancer and proxy that people use for TLS termination, HTTP load balancing and fronting self-hosted services.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast and stable in production (5 comments): "2+ services on seperate servers behind haproxy has been as stable as our Kubernetes Cluster" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48351725)) "you'll struggle to find anything faster or more stable in its field" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418828)) "for LB use cases, HAProxy is doing really well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48143637))
- Handles TLS and HTTP load balancing (3 comments): "an haproxy load balancer was much, much better on HTTP load balancing than Python code was" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227149)) "haproxy supports both the offload (client) and onload (backend) use case" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748823)) "HAproxy terminates the TLS as well as load baancing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667189))
- Fronts self-hosted services well (3 comments): "Initially, I stuffed jellyfin (and a bunch of other stuff) behind HAProxy[0], which was fine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630319)) "a small droplet with haproxy or nginx setup. Worked much better for me personally!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45966632)) "HAProxy or PGBouncer can help when self hosting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337181))
- Works reliably for years (3 comments): "2 bare-metals with Linux, Postgres, HAProxy and PHP work perfectly fine for 99% of apps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298198)) "I've found this to work quite well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299733)) "worked well for many years for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581746))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Pangolin](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pangolin.md): 37 recommend
- [Nginx Proxy Manager](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nginx-proxy-manager.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "HAProxy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/haproxy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).