Vultr Load Balancer vs Envoy Proxy
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Vultr Load Balancer and Envoy Proxy.
Quick Verdict
3.5/5
Vultr Load Balancer
0 reviews
4.2/5
Envoy Proxy
0 reviews
Envoy Proxy is rated higher (4.2 vs 3.5). Vultr Load Balancer distributes traffic across Vultr instances in any of their 33 global regions. Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) with configurable health checks and automatic failover. No SSL termination — TLS must be terminated at the backend. Hourly billing at $0.015/hour. Envoy is an open source L7 proxy and service mesh foundation. Used as the data plane in Istio, AWS App Mesh, and Consul Connect. High performance, built for microservices and Kubernetes.
Vultr Load Balancer Managed Layer 4 load balancer across 33 global regions | Envoy Proxy Cloud-native proxy and service mesh sidecar | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.5 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | paid | free |
| Starting price | From $10/mo | Free✓ |
| Best for | Teams already on Vultr who want managed failover and health-checked traffic distribution for a single-region cluster and handle TLS on their backends | Platform engineering teams on Kubernetes standardising ingress, mesh and egress traffic management on one open data plane, with the in-house or vendor expertise to own a control plane. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | hourly billingmanaged optioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tieropen source |
| Visit Vultr Load Balancer → | Visit Envoy Proxy → | |
Vultr Load Balancer
Pros
- + Fully managed with built-in health checks and automatic failover — no balancer VM to patch
- + Simple pricing: from $10/month ($0.015/hour), and bandwidth is charged on attached instances only
- + Available in all 33 Vultr regions, with optional global routing to the nearest healthy server
- + Full API/CLI support, so it fits Terraform and Ansible workflows
- + Works with any TCP/UDP application: web, APIs, game servers, database pools
Cons
- - No SSL termination despite marketing language about certificates — TLS must be handled at the backend
- - Layer 4 only: no path-based routing, header rules, WAF, or rate limiting
- - Balances Vultr instances only, in the same region — no hybrid or multi-provider backends
- - Price varies by data center without a published per-region table
- - DDoS mitigation is not part of the product; it is handled at Vultr's infrastructure level or as a paid add-on
Envoy Proxy
Pros
- + Free forever: Apache 2.0, no seats, no per-node licence, no usage metering
- + CNCF graduated with neutral governance and multi-vendor support options
- + xDS APIs are the de facto standard control-plane interface for service meshes and gateways
- + Depth of features: HTTP/3, gRPC-aware load balancing, circuit breaking, external auth, rate limiting, hot cert rotation
- + Documented support window (four minor versions patched) and a decade of production track record
- + Extensive observability hooks: stats, tracing headers, structured access logs
Cons
- - Configuration complexity is high; production-grade setups need a control plane or serious in-house expertise
- - No SLA or commercial support bundled — community support only
- - Sidecar overhead (latency and memory per proxy) is a real cost in large mesh deployments
- - C++ codebase narrows the pool of people who can debug core-level issues
- - Troubleshooting spans both Envoy docs and whatever control plane generates your config
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