# Load balancers: what AI models recommend, October 2026

IT AI Recommendation Index, October 2026 Edition. Asked as "load balancer" and as "application delivery controller", six framings each, to fourteen models with search on, on behalf of a mid-market B2B company. Added to the October 2026 Edition on October 4, 2026; its answers are read by the distilled judge (ai-indexes-judge-qwen3-14b-run3), not the claude-opus-5 judge of the earlier categories. Page: https://it-ai-index.com/network/load-balancers/

**Standing:** HAProxy leads with 29% of first choices; verdict contested. 52 first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts.

## First-choice share

| # | Product | Share | Negative rate | Labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HAProxy | 29% | 5% | 58 |
| 2 | Progress Kemp LoadMaster | 27% | 0% | 20 |
| 3 | NGINX | 15% | 4% | 53 |
| 4 | AWS Elastic Load Balancing | 6% | 12% | 33 |
| 5 | Cloudflare Load Balancing | 4% | 0% | 25 |
| 6 | Traefik | 2% | 0% | 21 |
| 7 | Azure Load Balancer | 2% | 14% | 29 |
| 8 | Azure Application Gateway | 2% | 0% | 10 |
| 9 | Google Cloud Load Balancing | 0% | 0% | 18 |
| 10 | Envoy | 0% | 6% | 18 |
| 11 | GCP Cloud Load Balancing | 0% | 25% | 12 |
| 12 | Citrix ADC | 0% | 48% | 27 |

## Each model's first choice on the direct prompt

- Claude Haiku 4.5: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer, NGINX; alternatives Citrix ADC, F5, HAProxy
- GPT-5.4 mini: Application Load Balancer; alternatives Azure Load Balancer, Google Cloud's Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer
- Gemini 3.5 Flash: Cloudflare Load Balancing; alternatives AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Application Gateway, HAProxy, NGINX
- Perplexity Sonar: HAProxy; alternatives AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Application Gateway
- Grok 4.1 Fast: HAProxy, NGINX; alternatives AWS ALB, Azure Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, GCP Cloud Load Balancing
- Mistral Small: Cloudflare Load Balancing; alternatives HAProxy, Progress Kemp LoadMaster, VMware Avi Load Balancer
- DeepSeek V4 Flash: Progress Kemp LoadMaster; alternatives AWS Application Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, HAProxy, NGINX
- Llama 4 Maverick: no first choice
- Qwen 3.7 Flash: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Application Gateway, NGINX; alternatives Cloudflare Load Balancing, HAProxy
- Kimi K2: HAProxy, Progress Kemp LoadMaster; alternatives F5 NGINX
- GLM 4.7 FlashX: NGINX, Progress Kemp LoadMaster; alternatives F5 BIG-IP, HAProxy
- MiniMax M2.5: Progress Kemp LoadMaster; alternatives AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, GCP Cloud Load Balancing
- GPT-6 Luna: AWS Application Load Balancer; alternatives Azure Application Gateway, Azure Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, Google Cloud Application Load Balancer
- Muse Glimmer 30B: Progress Kemp LoadMaster; alternatives AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer, Cloudflare Load Balancing, HAProxy

## Sources the answers cite

68 of 84 answers came back with a source list, from 14 of 14 models. Sites named in the most answers:

- loadbalancer.org: 31 answers, 45 citations
- g2.com: 27 answers, 45 citations
- guideflow.com: 25 answers, 32 citations
- kemptechnologies.com: 24 answers, 44 citations
- f5.com: 17 answers, 26 citations
- learn.microsoft.com: 17 answers, 25 citations
- learn.g2.com: 17 answers, 17 citations
- zipdo.co: 16 answers, 16 citations

Pages named in the most answers:

- https://loadbalancer.org/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-load-balancer (23 answers)
- https://guideflow.com/blog/load-balancer-software (16 answers)
- https://guideflow.com/et-ee/blog/load-balancer-software (16 answers)
- https://spotsaas.com/category/load-balancing-software (14 answers)
- https://nomios.com/news-blog/best-load-balancers-2024 (13 answers)
- https://xurrent.com/blog/top-load-balancers (13 answers)
- https://learn.g2.com/best-load-balancing-software (12 answers)
- https://expertinsights.com/network-security/the-top-application-delivery-controllers-adc (11 answers)
- https://devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-load-balancers-features-pros-cons-comparison (10 answers)
- https://myhospitalnow.com/blog/top-10-load-balancers-features-pros-cons-comparison (10 answers)

## Warned against

- F5 BIG-IP: 17 of 31 labels negative. "What I'd avoid for mid-sized B2B - F5 BIG-IP: ... over-engineered, expensive, and feature-heavy for mid-market needs" (DeepSeek V4 Flash, paraphrase prompt)
- Citrix ADC: 13 of 27 labels negative. "What I'd avoid for mid-sized B2B ... Citrix/NetScaler: More geared toward remote access and large-scale enterprise environments." (DeepSeek V4 Flash, paraphrase prompt)
- Azure Basic Load Balancer: 6 of 6 labels negative. "Microsoft retired the Basic Load Balancer on September 30, 2025... It's strongly recommended to upgrade to the Standard Load Balancer" (Mistral Small, negative prompt)
- Azure Load Balancer: 4 of 29 labels negative. "Cloud-native load balancers (AWS ELB, Azure LB, GCP LB) ... may lack deep packet inspection, advanced routing rules, or cross-cloud consistency" (MiniMax M2.5, negative prompt)

## Record

- Method: https://it-ai-index.com/methodology/
- Raw judge labels and full responses: https://it-ai-index.com/data/
- License: CC BY 4.0. Cite as IT AI Recommendation Index, October 2026 Edition, it-ai-index.com.