# HAProxy vs Azure Application Gateway: which do AI models recommend for load balancers, October 2026

IT AI Recommendation Index, October 2026 Edition, Load balancers. Three of fourteen models named HAProxy first on the direct prompt; one named Azure Application Gateway. Page: https://it-ai-index.com/network/load-balancers/haproxy-vs-azure-application-gateway/

| | First-choice share | Rank | Negative rate | Labels | Models naming it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HAProxy | 29% | #1 of 13 | 5% | 58 | 14 of 14 |
| Azure Application Gateway | 2% | #8 of 13 | 0% | 10 | 8 of 14 |

## The direct prompt, model by model

- Perplexity Sonar: haproxy first (first choices: HAProxy) (alternatives: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Application Gateway)
- Grok 4.1 Fast: haproxy first (first choices: HAProxy, NGINX) (alternatives: AWS ALB, Azure Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, GCP Cloud Load Balancing, Progress Kemp LoadMaster)
- Kimi K2: haproxy first (first choices: HAProxy, Progress Kemp LoadMaster) (alternatives: F5 NGINX)
- Qwen 3.7 Flash: azure application gateway first (first choices: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Application Gateway, NGINX) (alternatives: Cloudflare Load Balancing, HAProxy)
- Claude Haiku 4.5: neither first, one named (first choices: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer, NGINX) (alternatives: Citrix ADC, F5, HAProxy)
- Gemini 3.5 Flash: neither first, one named (first choices: Cloudflare Load Balancing) (alternatives: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Application Gateway, HAProxy, NGINX, Progress Kemp LoadMaster)
- Mistral Small: neither first, one named (first choices: Cloudflare Load Balancing) (alternatives: HAProxy, Progress Kemp LoadMaster, VMware Avi Load Balancer)
- DeepSeek V4 Flash: neither first, one named (first choices: Progress Kemp LoadMaster) (alternatives: AWS Application Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, HAProxy, NGINX)
- GLM 4.7 FlashX: neither first, one named (first choices: NGINX, Progress Kemp LoadMaster) (alternatives: F5 BIG-IP, HAProxy)
- GPT-6 Luna: neither first, one named (first choices: AWS Application Load Balancer) (alternatives: Azure Application Gateway, Azure Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, Google Cloud Application Load Balancer, Google Cloud Network Load Balancer)
- Muse Glimmer 30B: neither first, one named (first choices: Progress Kemp LoadMaster) (alternatives: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, HAProxy, NGINX)
- GPT-5.4 mini: neither named (first choices: Application Load Balancer) (alternatives: Azure Load Balancer, Google Cloud's Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer)
- Llama 4 Maverick: neither named
- MiniMax M2.5: neither named (first choices: Progress Kemp LoadMaster) (alternatives: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, GCP Cloud Load Balancing, NGINX)

## What the models said about HAProxy

- "Open‑source solutions that are no longer actively maintained (e.g., very old versions of HAProxy, Nginx...) | Unpatched CVEs" (GLM 4.7 FlashX, negative prompt, soft negative)
- "consider a third-party option like F5 or HAProxy, but that adds more ops overhead" (GPT-5.4 mini, direct prompt, soft negative)
- "running them on under-powered virtual machines (like a $5/mo VPS) creates a bottleneck" (Qwen 3.7 Flash, negative prompt, soft negative)
- "If you have standard web apps or APIs: Go with HAProxy. It has the broadest adoption, most documentation, and best performance for the price (free)." (Kimi K2, budget prompt, first choice)
- "The performance leader — handles millions of requests per second with sub-millisecond latency... HAProxy is the performance benchmark." (DeepSeek V4 Flash, comparative prompt, first choice)
- "Fastest and most stable - used by GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow ... High-performance, mission-critical | HAProxy" (Kimi K2, comparative prompt, first choice)

## What the models said about Azure Application Gateway

- "Use the Application Gateway on Azure or Network Load Balancer (NLB) on AWS if you have strict compliance requirements" (Qwen 3.7 Flash, direct prompt, first choice)
- "If everything is already in Azure and you prefer a managed service, Azure Application Gateway is a natural fit." (MiniMax M2.5, paraphrase prompt, alternative)
- "AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ALB/NLB) or Azure's Application Gateway run directly within your cloud architecture." (Gemini 3.5 Flash, direct prompt, alternative)

Share is the count of first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts over all fourteen models, for a mid-market B2B company; rank is within the category. Comparisons are drawn for the top eight products in each category. Published under CC BY 4.0; the output is the models' output, and nothing here is a recommendation by the index.