The Top 9 Load Balancing Software Solutions

A10 Thunder ADC is a high-performance load balancing solution designed to secure, manage, and optimize business applications across various multi-cloud environments.

Who it’s for: Ideal for enterprises, service providers, and cloud operators looking to improve availability, security, and performance of their critical applications.

Benefits: A10 Thunder ADC offers robust security features, application acceleration techniques, and support for multi-cloud deployments.

• A10 offers high availability and performance thanks to advanced Layer 4-7 load balancing ensuring application reliability and performance.
• Intelligent traffic management with customizable health checks.
• Unified management and automation is facilitated by Harmony Controller; this centralizes management across multiple clouds with real-time analytics and policy enforcement.
• A10 incorporates Web Application Firewall (WAF), Single-Sign-On (SSO), and protection against DDoS attacks and botnets.

The bottom line: A10 Thunder ADC is a comprehensive and effective load balancing solution. It can be deployed as hardware or software, and is suitable for public, private, and container-based setups.

• A10 Networks, headquartered in San Jose, California, serves over 7,000 global customers, including enterprises and cloud service providers.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes network traffic across multiple targets to support application scalability and high availability.

Who it’s for: Best suited for organizations needing scalable, and highly available load balancing solutions for web applications in cloud environments. ELB supports various environments, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, microservices, Lambda functions, and appliances in single or multiple availability zones (AZs).

Benefits: There are three types of load balancers to choose from based on specific application needs – Application Load Balancer for flexible application management, Network Load Balancer for extreme performance and static IP, and Classic Load Balancer for applications built within the EC2-Classic network.

• AWS delivers scalable traffic management, efficiently scaling its request handling capacity in response to incoming traffic surges.
• It conducts regular health checks to ensure traffic is routed only to healthy instances.
• Additional features include operational monitoring through Amazon CloudWatch metrics, AWS CloudTrail API call tracking, and delete protection to prevent accidental load balancer deletion.

The bottom line: AWS ELB is a comprehensive load balancing solution, prioritizing security and availability. Elastic Load Balancing efficiently scales its request handling capacity in response to incoming traffic and can handle sudden surges in demand.

• AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon, headquartered in Seattle, with millions of active customers globally.

Azure Load Balancer is a layer 4 load balancing solution that operates as a single point of contact for clients, distributing inbound flows to backend pool instances in either Azure Virtual Machines or Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

Who it’s for: Ideal for businesses needing scalable, high-availability load balancing solutions for both internal applications and internet-facing services. It supports both public and internal (private) load balancers.

Benefits: Azure Load Balancer provides low latency, high throughput, and can scale up to millions of flows for TCP and UDP applications

• Azure Load Balancer can balance both internal and external traffic, ensuring applications can scale smoothly.
• The solution distributes traffic within and across zones, increasing resource availability and providing consistently high availability.
• Health probes monitor load-balanced resources, ensuring optimal performance and availability.
• Built on a zero trust network security model, Azure operates within a private, isolated virtual network and uses Network Security Groups to control traffic.

The bottom line: Azure Load Balancer allows business to effectively access virtual machines through public IP addresses, balance load, and move resources around Azure regions as needed. It is secure by default, operating within a private and isolated virtual network.

• Azure Load Balancer is developed by Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, WA, and trusted by thousands of enterprises globally.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a network traffic management solution that optimizes and secures applications. It manages the traffic between clients and hosts and operates through a pre-configured virtual server that directs network traffic to the appropriate host based on server performance, security, and availability.

Who it’s for: Ideal for teams looking to improve application availability, security, and user experience.

Benefits: SSL acceleration, real-time analytics, full elasticity, strong security, availability, and full proxy visibility.

• By distributing application load across multiple servers and clouds, it ensures that applications are always accessible.
• Employs TCP optimization, caching, and supports emerging protocols for IoT clients, such as MQTT
• Delivers industry-leading SSL performance and protection against DDoS attacks, while also offering data encryption, Perfect Forward Secrecy, and key protection functions.
• Its real-time analytics offer detailed application health monitoring and valuable insights.

The bottom line: F5 BIG-IP is a secure and reliable network traffic management solution. F5 application services are compatible with major cloud providers and can be integrated through marketplace offerings with various consumption options.

• F5 Networks, headquartered in Seattle, WA, serves over 16,000 customers globally, providing comprehensive application delivery networking solutions.

Google Cloud Load Balancing (GCLB) is a high-performance solution designed to manage traffic on Google Cloud with cross-region balancing and auto failover capabilities.

Who it’s for: Ideal for enterprises needing a scalable and flexible load balancing solution that can accommodate unpredictable traffic spikes and diverse traffic types. Being fully distributed and software-defined, it can be applied to all types of traffic, including HTTP(S), TCP/SSL, and UDP.

Benefits: GCLB supports various load balancing types such as HTTP(S) load balancing; this balances traffic across multiple backend instances, in multiple regions, using a single global IP address.

• Provides automatic multi-region failover, reacting instantly to changes in traffic, network conditions, and backend health.
• TCP/SSL/UDP load balancing with scalable Layer 4 load balancers, SSL offload for centralized SSL certificate management and decryption, and advanced support for IPv6 global load balancing, WebSockets, user-defined request headers, and protocol forwarding for private VIPs.
• Users are able to access metrics to understand app and system services performance better.
• Supports Cloud CDN integration, allowing users to optimize application delivery with just a single checkbox.

The bottom line: Google Cloud Load Balancing is a leading solution, handling over 1 million queries per second. The platform is suited to handling traffic spikes, whilst ensuring that overall performance is not affected.

• Google Cloud is a global provider of cloud computing services, headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide.

F5 NGINX Plus combines the functionalities of a load balancer, reverse proxy, web server, and content cache. It adds enterprise-grade features to NGINX Open Source.

Who it’s for: NGINX Plus is designed for app infrastructure and development teams who require advanced monitoring, strengthened security controls, or Kubernetes container orchestration capabilities.

Benefits: NGINX Plus ensures scalable and reliable high availability as well as offering monitoring features for debugging and diagnosing complex application architectures.

• Connection and request limiting, TLS 1.3 support, dynamic certificate loading, and JWT authentication.
• Supports session persistence, active health checks, and can reconfigure dynamically without requiring a server restart.
• Manages API traffic alongside regular web traffic and adjusts to different API gateway models.
• Enterprise features including DNS system discovery, session persistence, and a RESTful API.
• Integrates with the Azure ecosystem as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution.

The bottom line: NGINX Plus is an effective load balancing solution. The optional NGINX App Protect WAF further the security of modern apps and APIs.

• NGINX was acquired by F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) in 2019.

Kemp LoadMaster is an advanced Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and load balancer that ensures high availability, enhanced security, and optimized performance for business-critical applications and websites.

Who it’s for: This solution is ideal for organizations needing robust load balancing and comprehensive security for their critical applications and public cloud deployments. LoadMaster provides maximum reliability and availability for virtual applications, desktops, VPNs and public cloud applications.

Benefits: LoadMaster enhances overall security with application protection features, including web API and application protection against zero-day and common exploits, zero-trust network access, as well as pre-authentication and single sign-on capabilities.

• Offers layer 4-7 load balancing with intelligent content matching and advanced multi-tier traffic routing. This ensures client requests are consistently directed to the best possible target.
• Enhances geographic traffic distribution and application availability with its Global Multi-Site Load Balancing feature.
• Integrates zero trust architecture models, multi-factor authentication, and a Web Application Firewall (WAF).
• Provides detailed dashboards, monitoring tools, and certificate lifecycle management to ensure optimal application performance and prevent downtime.
• Simplifies SSL/TLS management by offloading encryption overhead and streamlining compliance and certificate lifecycle management.

The bottom line: Progress Kemp LoadMaster offer a range of load balancing/ADC options including hardware, virtual, and cloud deployments, providing flexibility and high-performance for any environment.

• Kemp Technologies is headquartered in New York, USA, with over 100,000 deployments worldwide.

Traefik is an open-source reverse proxy and ingress controller that simplifies networking complexity for deploying services and APIs.

Who it’s for: Teams looking for an open source flexible reverse proxy solution to manage and secure APIs and services across multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, or on-premises environments.

Benefits: Capable of handling complex deployments, Traefik supports all major protocols and can be flexibly managed using its middleware for load balancing, rate-limiting, circuit breakers, mirroring, and authentication.

• Traefik automatically configures itself through service discovery, integrating seamlessly with existing infrastructure components.
• The platform offers extensive Protocol Support through handling multiple protocols including HTTP/2, HTTP/3, Websockets, and gRPC.
• Advanced traffic management, with features like load balancing, rate limiting, and SSL termination.
• Provides real-time metrics and distributed tracing, integrating with tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger for better monitoring and observability.
• Offers built-in support for top distributed tracing and metrics providers

The bottom line: Traefik delivers high availability, scalability, and security features to ensure that traffic can be handled in the most appropriate and effective way.

• Traefik’s headquarters is in Lyon, France, and has over 3 billion downloads and over 750 contributors.

VMware Avi Load Balancer simplifies application delivery with software defined load balances, integration with WMWare web application firewall, and scalable container ingress services.

Who it’s for: Ideal for infrastructure teams looking to implement an efficient, automated load balancing and application performance solution.

Benefits: Avi Load Balancer reduces management overheads and complexities for on-premises data centers and hybrid / public clouds.

• Local and global load balancing with TLS 1.3 support, SSL termination, default gateway, GSLB, DNS, wildcard VIP, other L4–L7 services and intelligent traffic routing.
• Simplifies load balancing operations with centralized policy management and API-based integrations.
• Self-service DevOps automation tool kits, including VCF Automation, Python SDK, RESTful APIs, Ansible and Terraform integrations.
• Real-time analytics into your network with application performance monitoring, including GenAI insights.
• Extends to other app services via integration with additional VMWare solutions, such as VMWare web application firewall, all managed via a single platform.

The bottom line: Avi Load Balancer helps teams deliver consistent application services across virtual and containerized environments. The service is available as a standalone solution, or as an add-on to the VMWare Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation platforms.

• VMWare was acquired by Broadcom in November 2023.