Pulled August 2026
What the others cost
None of the three publish a rate card you can just read. Everything below comes from reseller listings and third party price trackers. Treat the numbers as the right order of magnitude and nothing finer.
These are not quotes
Every vendor on this page sells through sales. What you actually pay depends on throughput, term, support tier and how well you negotiate, and it will not be exactly this. If a number matters to your decision, get a quote.
NGINX Plus
F5
About $1,500
per instance, per year
How it is sold. Subscription per instance, annual or three year. F5 publish no list price and every deal is a quote.
Price trackers put the range at roughly $849 to $2,099 per instance per year, with about $1,495 the common figure for a single node. App Protect, the WAF, is roughly $2,000 per instance per year on top. Support tier changes the number again. Instance Manager and NGINX One, which is where the browser based configuration lives, are priced separately.
The engine itself, free nginx, costs nothing. Source: third party price trackers and reseller listings, because F5 publish none.
Kemp LoadMaster
Progress
From $2,500 once
perpetual license, plus yearly support
How it is sold. Perpetual license with an annual support subscription, or a pooled subscription, or pay as you go in a cloud marketplace.
Reseller listings put the VLM-200 at about $2,500 and the VLM-3000 at about $4,000 as a one time perpetual license, with support charged yearly on top. In AWS and Azure a VLM-200 runs around $0.29 an hour with support included. There is a genuinely free tier with capped throughput, which is unusual and worth knowing about.
The catch is which plan you are on. The WAF, GSLB and the authentication pack all need Enterprise or Enterprise Plus, so three of the rows Kemp wins in the comparison are not in the entry price.
Source: Kemp's own pricing page lists the plans but no numbers, so the figures come from reseller listings.
HAProxy ALOHA
HAProxy Technologies
$995 to $5,000
per instance, per year
How it is sold. Subscription per appliance, annual or multi year, priced on throughput. Hardware costs extra.
HAProxy publish no list price either. Trackers put HAProxy Enterprise, the engine inside ALOHA, at roughly $995 to $5,000 per instance per year across the Basic, Standard and Premium tiers. ALOHA itself is quoted by appliance model and throughput, so a physical unit lands above that range.
Support is included and is not tiered by who answers. HAProxy community edition, which is most of the engine, costs nothing.
Source: third party price trackers and the vendor's support and product pages.
Failover LB
This project
$0
per node, per year, forever
How it is sold. It is not. No license, no per instance fee, no support contract. There is nobody to buy one from.
Free nginx underneath and this project on top of it, MIT licensed.
The cost is not zero, it has just moved. You carry the build, you carry the upgrades, and at three in the morning the person on call is you. The support row at the top of the comparison is that price written out properly.
Source: not applicable.
What two nodes with a firewall actually comes to
A realistic shape for a small organization: two load balancers, both able to carry the full load on their own, with a web application firewall in front of the applications.
| Product | Rough year one | What that includes |
|---|---|---|
| NGINX Plus with App Protect | About $7,000 | Two instances at about $1,500, plus the WAF at about $2,000 per instance. Browser based configuration is a separate product again. |
| Kemp LoadMaster Enterprise | $5,000 upward | Two perpetual licenses plus support. The WAF and GSLB need the higher plan. |
| HAProxy ALOHA | $2,000 to $10,000 | Two subscriptions, priced on throughput. Support included. Hardware extra if physical. |
| Failover LB | $0 | Two servers you were paying for anyway. Everything on the feature list, including the WAF and GSLB. |
Every figure above is arithmetic on the ranges in the cards, not a quote. The point is the order of magnitude, not the decimal places.
What free actually costs
Zero is the license, not the cost. Being straight about the rest matters more than the number.
- Somebody builds nginx on each node. It is one command and it takes a few minutes, and it is still a thing somebody owns.
- Somebody watches the upgrades. Building from source means you do not get security fixes from apt. The build page tells you what versions you would move to, and pressing the button is still your job.
- When it breaks, the person fixing it is you. There is no number to ring and nobody contractually obliged to answer.
- Nobody has audited it. The design is written down in detail so you can judge it, and the source is small enough to read. That is not the same as an audit.
Set that against a support contract and the gap closes a long way. For an organization with a team and a budget, paying somebody is often the right answer and this page is not trying to argue otherwise.
When you should buy something instead
Buy the commercial product if any of these are true
- You need somebody contractually obliged to answer the phone.
- You need packaged video streaming, NTLM connection pinning or MQTT filtering, none of which can be done from outside the nginx process.
- An audit requires a vendor with an audit trail behind them, and a well documented design does not satisfy it.
- Nobody in your organization is going to own the upgrades, and being honest about that now is much cheaper than finding out later.
If none of those are true, the money is better spent on almost anything else.