What is Traefik and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Traefik
- HAProxy
HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. ...
- Kong
Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform. ...
- NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018. ...
- Istio
Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc. ...
- Envoy
Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures. ...
- Ambassador
Map services to arbitrary URLs in a single, declarative YAML file. Configure routes with CORS support, circuit breakers, timeouts, and more. Replace your Kubernetes ingress controller. Route gRPC, WebSockets, or HTTP. ...
- Caddy
Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. ...
- AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task. ...
Traefik alternatives & related posts
- Load balancer130
- High performance100
- Very fast69
- Proxying for tcp and http58
- SSL termination55
- Open source31
- Reliable27
- Free20
- Well-Documented18
- Very popular12
- Runs health checks on backends7
- Suited for very high traffic web sites7
- Scalable6
- Ready to Docker5
- Powers many world's most visited sites4
- Work with NTLM2
- Ssl offloading2
- Simple2
- Becomes your single point of failure4
related HAProxy posts











Around the time of their Series A, Pinterest’s stack included Python and Django, with Tornado and Node.js as web servers. Memcached / Membase and Redis handled caching, with RabbitMQ handling queueing. Nginx, HAproxy and Varnish managed static-delivery and load-balancing, with persistent data storage handled by MySQL.
We're using Git through GitHub for public repositories and GitLab for our private repositories due to its easy to use features. Docker and Kubernetes are a must have for our highly scalable infrastructure complimented by HAProxy with Varnish in front of it. We are using a lot of npm and Visual Studio Code in our development sessions.
- Easy to maintain36
- Easy to install31
- Flexible24
- Great performance20
- Api blueprint5
- Custom Plugins4
- Kubernetes-native3
- Agnostic2
- 1231231
- 123123121
- 1231
- 11
- Security1
- Load balancing1
- Documentation is clear1
- 121
related Kong posts
As for the new support of service mesh pattern by Kong, I wonder how does it compare to Istio?
We needed a lightweight and completely customizable #microservices #gateway to be able to generate #JWT and introspect #OAuth2 tokens as well. The #gateway was going to front all #APIs for our single page web app as well as externalized #APIs for our partners.
ContendersWe looked at Tyk Cloud and Kong. Kong's plugins are all Lua based and its core is NGINX and OpenResty. Although it's open source, it's not the greatest platform to be able to customize. On top of that enterprise features are paid and expensive. Tyk is Go and the nomenclature used within Tyk like "sessions" was bizarre, and again enterprise features were paid.
DecisionWe ultimately decided to roll our own using ExpressJS into Express Gateway because the use case for using ExpressJS as an #API #gateway was tried and true, in fact - all the enterprise features that the other two charge for #OAuth2 introspection etc were freely available within ExpressJS middleware.
OutcomeWe opened source Express Gateway with a core set of plugins and the community started writing their own and could quickly do so by rolling lots of ExpressJS middleware into Express Gateway
NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance893
- Easy to configure727
- Open source606
- Load balancer529
- Scalability287
- Free286
- Web server223
- Simplicity174
- Easy setup135
- Content caching29
- Web Accelerator20
- Capability14
- Fast13
- High-latency11
- Predictability11
- Reverse Proxy7
- Supports http/26
- The best of them5
- Lots of Modules4
- Enterprise version4
- Great Community4
- High perfomance proxy server3
- Reversy Proxy3
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- Streaming media3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Lightweight2
- Blash2
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Slim2
- saltstack2
- Ingress controller1
- GRPC-Web1
- Virtual hosting1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- A0
- Advanced features require subscription8
related NGINX posts

















Recently I have been working on an open source stack to help people consolidate their personal health data in a single database so that AI and analytics apps can be run against it to find personalized treatments. We chose to go with a #containerized approach leveraging Docker #containers with a local development environment setup with Docker Compose and nginx for container routing. For the production environment we chose to pull code from GitHub and build/push images using Jenkins and using Kubernetes to deploy to Amazon EC2.
We also implemented a dashboard app to handle user authentication/authorization, as well as a custom SSO server that runs on Heroku which allows experts to easily visit more than one instance without having to login repeatedly. The #Backend was implemented using my favorite #Stack which consists of FeathersJS on top of Node.js and ExpressJS with PostgreSQL as the main database. The #Frontend was implemented using React, Redux.js, Semantic UI React and the FeathersJS client. Though testing was light on this project, we chose to use AVA as well as ESLint to keep the codebase clean and consistent.
We switched to Traefik so we can use the REST API to dynamically configure subdomains and have the ability to redirect between multiple servers.
We still use nginx with a docker-compose to expose the traffic from our APIs and TCP microservices, but for managing routing to the internet Traefik does a much better job
The biggest win for naologic was the ability to set dynamic configurations without having to restart the server
Istio
- Zero code for logging and monitoring13
- Service Mesh8
- Great flexibility7
- Powerful authorization mechanisms4
- Ingress controller4
- Full Security3
- Resiliency3
- Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker3
- Performance15
related Istio posts
As for the new support of service mesh pattern by Kong, I wonder how does it compare to Istio?
related Envoy posts
At uSwitch we wanted a way to load balance between our multiple Kubernetes clusters in AWS to give us added redundancy. We already had ingresses defined for all our applications so we wanted to build on top of that, instead of creating a new system that would require our various teams to change code/config etc.
Envoy seemed to tick a lot of boxes:
- Loadbalancing capabilities right out of the box: health checks, circuit breaking, retries etc.
- Tracing and prometheus metrics support
- Lightweight
- Good community support
This was all good but what really sold us was the api that supported dynamic configuration. This would allow us to dynamically configure envoy to route to ingresses and clusters as they were created or destroyed.
To do this we built a tool called Yggdrasil using their Go sdk. Yggdrasil effectively just creates envoy configuration from Kubernetes ingress objects, so you point Yggdrasil at your kube clusters, it generates config from the ingresses and then envoy can loadbalance between your clusters for you. This is all done dynamically so as soon as new ingress is created the envoy nodes get updated with the new config. Importantly this all worked with what we already had, no need to create new config for every application, we just put this on top of it.
We are looking to configure a load balancer with some admin UI. We are currently struggling to decide between NGINX, Traefik, HAProxy, and Envoy. We will use a load balancer in a containerized environment and the load balancer should flexible and easy to reload without changes in case containers are scaled up.
Ambassador
- Edge-proxy3
- Kubernetes friendly configuration1
related Ambassador posts
- Sane config file syntax6
- Easy HTTP/2 Server Push5
- Builtin HTTPS4
- Letsencrypt support2
- Runtime config API2
- New kid3
related Caddy posts
We used to primarily use nginx for our static web server and proxy in-front of Node.js. Now, we use Caddy. And we couldn't be happier.
Caddy is simpler on all fronts. Configuration is easier. Free HTTPS out of the box. Some fantastic plugins. And for the most part, it's fast.
Don't get me wrong, it's not lost on me that Nginx is actually a superior product.
But for the times when you don't need that extra performance, and complexity - take a look at Caddy.
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
- Easy47
- ASG integration7
- Coding1
- Reliability1
- SSL offloading0