20 Best Load Balancing Software Of 2024

Fastly is a cloud platform that allows users to improve their services’ speed, scale, and security, and one of its products is a Layer-7 load balancer.

Why I Picked Fastly: I picked Fastly because it manages inbound HTTP and HTTPS requests with in-depth content-aware routing decisions to allow you to set rules for how you want traffic redirected. With these rules, you can improve responses before they go out and provide a strong foundation for your infrastructure.

Fastly Standout Features and Integrations

Features I love include the ability to instantly scale up to several terabits per second (Tbps), allowing for smooth, rapid growth. It also offers granular control over both content-aware and other routing decisions for streamlined scaling and visibility.

Integrations include native support for Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS.

Google Cloud Load Balancing is a fully distributed part of the Google Cloud platform with more than 80 distinct locations. It can balance HTTP(S), TCP/SSL, and UDP traffic.

Why I Picked Google Cloud Load Balancing: Google Cloud Load Balancing stood out to me because it takes a different approach from the competition by going to great lengths to keep its different load balancer types in one place rather than split them into separate services.

When you get started with the platform, you’re presented with a detailed flowchart that you can follow to find a load balancer that you think might work, and if it doesn’t, it’s very easy to switch over to a different one because of the way they’re set up.

This makes it ideal for teams that are constantly iterating upon their product with requirements that change frequently.

Google Cloud Load Balancing Standout Features and Integrations

Features that I believe help active developers work smarter include Cloud Armor integration, which provides advanced security capabilities that protect you against application and DDoS attacks with strong web application firewall (WAF) functions. High-fidelity health checks ensure you know the status of your service and can act on issues early before they become serious. It’s also built on the same infrastructure that serves the front end of Google, meaning it can support up to 1 million requests per second.

Integrations are available natively with Google Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Google Cloud Armor.

Elastic Load Balancer is one of the load balancers available within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. It splits its main features across four levels: Application, Network, Gateway, and Classic Load Balancers.

Why I picked AWS Elastic Load Balancer: I chose AWS Elastic Load Balancer for its ability to distribute traffic across a variety of targets, such as virtual machine instances, containers, IP addresses, Lambda functions, and appliances, to single or multi-availability zones. This ensures that overall capacity can scale upward or downward depending on demand and increases your system’s availability.

AWS Elastic Load Balancer Standout Features and Integrations

Features I like in ELB for large-scale operations include health checks that automatically distribute incoming traffic to healthy targets. High throughput accounts for traffic patterns that are prone to sudden changes, while Amazon CloudWatch monitors and logs metrics like error and request counts, types, and latency.

Integrations include native support for other AWS services such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Instances, Elastic Container Service (ECS), Certificate Manager, CloudWatch, and AWS Web Application Firewall.

Amazon Lightsail is part of the AWS family of cloud-native products. There are several other load balancing options within the catalog, but Lightsail makes the most sense for smaller operations.

Why I Picked Amazon Lightsail: I picked Amazon Lightsail because of how its tiers are organized, where the entry-level gives you a virtual server with 512MB of memory running on a single-core processor. For a lightweight app or website, this should be enough to handle most user requests and the occasional spikes.

Amazon Lightsail Standout Features and Integrations

Features that made me recommend Lightsail for lightweight applications that are sill in their early stages include an intuitive management console that makes it easy for beginners to operate and configure the load balancer. There’s a different version called Lightsail for Research that lets you run analytical functions in the cloud with Jupyter, RStudio, and Scilab preloaded.

Integrations are available natively with most other products in the AWS lineup, including Amplify, Beanstalk, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Lambda, Batch, Local Zones, Outposts, Auto Scaling, Wavelength, and SimSpace Weaver.

Citrix NetScaler is an application delivery controller (ADC) that provides Layer 4 and 7 balancing as well as identity management, security, and other functions. The version I’m going to discuss is a software alternative to the hardware option from the same company, also under the NetScaler brand.

Why I Picked Citrix NetScaler WAF: I picked NetScaler because of its built-in Remote Desktop Policy (RDP) proxy that also allows for stateless configuration. When you set this up, you can use the Citrix Secure Ticket Authority (STA) server to manage the short-term requests that are typical of stateless applications.

Citrix NetScaler WAF Standout Features and Integrations

Features that really stand out to me include support for both Layer 4 and Layer 7 balancing, making for a comprehensive solution. The native RDP proxy also ensures that users’ sessions aren’t affected by outages, even at higher traffic levels, making stateless applications more reliable. Granular analytics lets you detect misuse and attacks early and take action.

Integrations include pre-built support for Azure Active Directory (AD), Okta, Duo, CyberArk, and Zendesk Blumira.

NGINX Plus is a premium alternative to the open-source NGINX, both of which are developed and maintained by the same core team. Plus, however, brings additional perks with its price tag, most notably customer support.

Why I Picked NGINX Plus: I picked NGINX Plus because it’s lightweight, making it a suitable choice for on-premise deployments running minimal hardware. With customer support at your fingertips, you can comfortably maintain a private server and not worry about putting out every fire by yourself.

NGINX Plus Standout Features and Integrations

Features include the same things you get with NGINX, which I’ve found leaves a very small footprint on hardware, along with some enterprise-grade additions like active health checks that give you insight into the state of your servers. You also get DNS service discovery and an API that purges caches.

Integrations include native support for Kubernetes, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and major versions of Linux like Ubuntu, Oracle, Alpine, and Redhat.

Linode, a cloud service company that provided virtual machines, servers, and infrastructure, introduced NodeBalancer as a load balancing solution. Akamai acquired Linode in 2022 and integrated it into its own offerings the following year, but NodeBalancer is still available.

Why I Picked NodeBalancer: I picked NodeBalancer because of how well the company behind it lays out what it means to switch to the solution, so you have a clear idea of what you’re getting into. Aside from pricing information, you also know the kinds of servers available and aren’t locked in, making it easy for a small business to feel it out.

NodeBalancer Standout Features and Integrations

Features that I believe small businesses will love include sticky sessions that have your NodeBalancers send all requests through the same back end, allowing for sessions to work more smoothly. Throttling sets a restriction on a NodeBalancer to prevent misuse and protect resources on your back end.

Integrations are available natively with Terraform, Pulumi, Rancher, and Ansible, as well as other products from the Akamai Connected Cloud.

IBM Cloud offers a variety of load balances depending on your traffic volumes, allowing for scaling. The options are classic and virtual private cloud (VPC) load balancers.

Why I Picked IBM Cloud: I picked IBM Cloud for its support of virtual servers for VPC infrastructure, which creates a hybrid cloud model that allows for more flexible deployments. Companies that want to reap the benefits of public cloud computing but want to keep certain parts of their operations on-premises can implement this approach to load balancing.

IBM Cloud Standout Features and Integrations

Features in IBM Cloud that I liked for hybrid cloud usage include round robin and least connections capabilities for intelligent distribution of traffic. You also get multiple options for deployment, including the built-in interface, an Application Programming Interface (API), and Terraform.

Integrations are available with Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) when you use IBM API Connect.

Azure Load Balancer is one of four load balancing options available on the Microsoft Azure platform. It operates on Layer 4 of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model.

Why I picked Azure Load Balancer: I picked Azure Load Balancer because it has three sub-units, namely Standard, Basic, and Gateway, all of which serve different situations with targeted pricing, scaling capabilities, and other features. This makes it an attractive choice for businesses looking to scale upward or downward because they don’t have to relocate their operations as they cross thresholds.

Azure Load Balancer Standout Features and Integrations

Features that I think will help you scale operations include support for millions of flows on all UDP and TCP applications while maintaining high latency and low throughput. Health probes let you automate status monitoring, so it’s easy to scale upwards.

You can also take more control of your platform if you configure rules that determine how the load balancer distributes inbound traffic. With High Availability (HA) ports, you can use one rule to distribute UDP and TCP flows for increased scale and availability within virtual networks for network virtual appliances (NVAs).

Integrations are available with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Microsoft Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Azure Virtual Machines, and Valtix.

Barracuda Networks provides physical load balancers but also has a software alternative in the form of its Web Application Firewall for more flexible deployments. It’s a cloud-native solution that protects web apps and gives you insights into their performance as well as granular control all in one place.

Why I picked Barracuda Networks Web Application Firewall: I chose Barracuda Networks because it has a very strong approach to customer service with a responsive department. The company has dedicated lines for major regions such as EMEA, Australia, China, Japan, and India and says that all requests for assistance go straight to a live person.

Barracuda Networks Standout Features and Integrations

Features that complement the customer service team include adaptive profiling, which samples traffic from reliable hosts to let admins implement whitelist rules on vulnerable sectors to reduce threats. It also protects against bots to keep scraping, inventory hoarding, spam, and similar types of attacks at bay, which all teams can benefit from in my opinion.

There’s also a built-in engine that automates the creation and maintenance of configurations on complex applications by analyzing traffic to provide recommendations.

Integrations are pre-built for third-party platforms like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.