HAproxy is great at exactly one thing: load balancing. It's better than nginx for that one use, because it's more flexible, has better controls for flapping, is smarter about queuing, gives you cool stats pages, etc.

Nginx is great for...pretty much everything else.

agree - i see a lot of start ups putting haproxy behind nginx for load balancing but i have never figured out why they wouldnt just stick with nginx. does anyone have an example of how the configuration looks on github?

there are features that haproxy support out of the box, e.g. sticky session load balancing, http 1.1 to upstream (newer version of nginx also support btw); on the other hand, people use nginx for SSL termination.

any chance could either explain this a bit more or post a link to a blog? this is very interesting to me and i do not know much about it