Load balancers feature comparison: Envoy vs HA Proxy vs Nginx

Baseline of features is fron Nginx here.

Features	Nginx	HA Proxy	Envoy
Load balancer	+	+	+
HTTP/TCP/UDP support	+ (TCP/UDP Nginx Plus)	+
Layer 7 request routing	+	+	+
Active health checks	+ (NGINX Plus)	+	+
Session persistence	+ (NGINX Plus)	+	- (couldn’t find it)
DNS service‑discovery integration	+ (NGINX Plus)	+	+
Content cache	+	+	+
Static/Dynamic content caching	+	+	- (couldn’t find it)
Web server/Reverse proxy	+	+	+
Origin server for static content	+	-	-
Reverse proxy: HTTP, FastCGI, memcached, SCGI, uwsgi	+	+	+
HTTP/2 gateway	+	+	+
gRPC proxy	+	+	+
HTTP/2 server push (explanation)	+	+	- (couldn’t find it)
Security controls	+
HTTP Basic Authentication	+	+	+ with ext. modules
IP address‑based access control lists	+	+	+ with ext. modules
Rate limiting	+	+	+
TLS 1.3 support	+	+	+
JWT authentication	+ (NGINX Plus)	+/- needs an extension	+
Monitoring	+
Extended status with 90 additional metrics	+ (NGINX Plus)	+ solid metrics	+ good metrics
High availability (HA)	+	+
Active‑active and active‑passive modes	+ (NGINX Plus)	+
Configuration synchronization	+ (NGINX Plus)	Needs pro version
State sharing: Sticky‑Learn session persistence, rate limiting	+ (NGINX Plus)	+	+
Programmability	+	+	+
Extensibility	+ using Open REST	+ using Lua	+
Dynamic reconfiguration without process reloads	+ (NGINX Plus)	+	+
Streaming media	+	-	-
Live streaming: RTMP, HLS, DASH	+	-	-
VOD: Flash (flv), MP4	+	-	-
Adaptive bitrate VOD: HLS, HDS	+ (NGINX Plus)	-	-
MP4 bandwidth controls	+ (NGINX Plus)	-	-
Third party ecosystem	+	+	+
Kubernetes Ingress controller	+	+	+