Last Updated on March 4, 2026
Balance is a load balancing solution being a simple but powerful generic TCP proxy with round robin load balancing and failover capabilities.
Its behaviour can be easily controlled at runtime using a simple command line syntax.
Balance is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Supports IPv6 on the listening side which makes it a very useful tool for IPv6 migration of IPv4 only services and servers.
- Cross-platform support – runs on Linux(386), Linux(Itanium), FreeBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, Cygwin, Mac-OS X, HP-UX and many more.
Website: balance.inlab.net
Support:
Developer: Inlab Networks
License: GNU General Public License
Related Software
| Load Balancers | |
|---|---|
| Traefik | Modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer |
| HAProxy | High availability layer 7 load balancer and proxy server for TCP and HTTP |
| Cilium | eBPF-based Networking, Observability, Security |
| nginx | Includes a L7 load balancer |
| RoadRunner | High-performance PHP application server, load balancer, and process manager |
| fabio | Fast, modern, zero-conf load balancing HTTP(S) and TCP router |
| BFE | Modern L7 load balancer |
| gobetween | Modern and minimalistic L4 load balancer and reverse-proxy |
| Seesaw | Linux Virtual Server (LVS) based load balancing platform. L4 load balancer |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server and HTTP/TCP load balancer |
| GLB Director | Set of stateless L4 load balancer servers |
| Balance | Generic TCP proxy with round robin load balancing and failover capabilities |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |