A10 Networks Lightning ADC vs HAProxy vs NetScaler comparison

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

7,217 Views
5,485 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

A10 Networks Lightning ADC

Read 107 NetScaler reviews

7,489 Views
6,066 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between A10 Networks Lightning ADC, HAProxy, and NetScaler based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetScaler, F5, Microsoft and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: July 2025).

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 865,164 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of A10 Networks Lightning ADC is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HAProxy is 11.9%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetScaler is 14.4%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

RONALDO DE MELO

Sales Account Executive at l8

Efficient application security while optimizing connections

The initial setup is simple; it is not complex. The configuration itself is simple and can be done in a couple of hours. However, the migration of the system to A10 Networks takes longer due to critical applications. Clients prefer to move them one by one, which is why it takes a significant amount of time. The configuration itself is simple, especially for this application.

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Kaushlendra Singh

Manager - IT Infrastructure and Network at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Used for load balancing, but its dashboard and reporting could be improved

We use the solution for load balancing The solution's implementation and troubleshooting are not easy. The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved. I have been using HAProxy for 12 years. We didn’t face any issues with the solution’s stability. I rate the solution’s stability an…

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DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU

Cloud Consultant at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking

Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"What I like about Lightning ADC, is that instead of having a big appliance sitting in front of the Kubernetes cluster, Lightning can pretty much go inside of Kubernetes."

"It allows you to secure the application while balancing the connections for many other customers, reducing CPU usage and server load."

"Our clients appreciate that this is a security enabled solution."

"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"

"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."

"I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime."

"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."

"Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind."

"The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB-algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none."

"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."

"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."

More HAProxy pros

"It is the best product out there."

"The solution improves security performance."

"The web application firewall which protects our services on the internet, and then of course services like our ability to provide high availability for the services we are offering are the most valuable features."

"I like the ease of use. It's easy to manage. I also like it's ease of use with virtualization technologies with applications."

"If you need PCI-compliance and have high security requirements, WAF is the most valuable feature. If you need to monitor your load-balancing services with complex types of monitoring, make sure everything is alright, and load balancing is important, Content Switching and Monitoring features are the keys to your needs. If you want to provide a lot of static images or data, the Caching feature works best for you."

"We appreciate that this solution facilitates our access to Citrix internet."

"The solution was very easy to deploy."

"Global load balancing between data centers."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"A10 documentation is not as open and accessible as AWS and Azure documentation is."

"We would like to see some improvement in the rapidity with which we can customize security facts within the solution."

"The support from A10 should be improved."

"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."

"The configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer."

"HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets."

"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."

"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."

"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."

"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."

"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."

More HAProxy cons

"The WAF component needs to be simplified so that it is easier to use."

"Development team's response time could be better."

"I would like to see more integration for single sign-on."

"Native integration needs to be improved. You cannot build ISE codes natively. For DevOps, integration would be very helpful because it would be a lot simpler from an operational standpoint."

"Manageability and adaptability can also be challenging for end customers."

"If one device or switch fails, the failover to another device is not seamless which is painful."

"Does not include security. A web application firewall would be a nice addition."

"This is an expensive solution."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"It is free of cost."

"We are using HAProxy as an open-source."

"HAProxy is an open-source solution."

"We use NGINX as well. However, because the health checks are a paid feature, I like to avoid it whenever possible."

"Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products."

"The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."

"The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"I do not have any experience with the pricing of the product."

"For the specific use case that my customers primarily engage with, I would give the pricing a rating of seven out of ten."

"NetScaler does the same thing as an F5 and it's cheaper."

"I rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"Citrix NetScaler's pricing is slightly above average but not overly expensive. I would consider F5 BIG IP to be the most expensive, Citrix NetScaler to be the second most expensive, and then Kemp Load Balancer to be the third."

"Citrix Web App and API Protection are in the middle when we talk about pricing and licensing"

"We have been evaluating F5, Citrix, and other ADC products. Citrix is the most expense of all of them."

"The solution's pricing is very high compared to its competitors."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.

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865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Do you recommend HAProxy?

I do recommend HAProxy for more simple applications or for companies with a low budget, since HAProxy is a free, open...

What do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

What do you like most about Citrix ADC?

The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic ente...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADC?

After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more...

What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexi...

LoadBalancer Enterprise vs A10 Networks Lightning ADC

Comparisons

Compared 36% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs A10 Networks Lightning ADC

Compared 31% of the time

More A10 Networks Lightning ADC Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 13% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs HAProxy

Compared 10% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 9% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler

Compared 9% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs NetScaler

Compared 8% of the time

NGINX Plus vs NetScaler

Compared 7% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

More NetScaler Competitors

Product Reports

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

July 2025

Download A10 Networks Lightning ADC product report

Download HAProxy product report

August 2025

Download NetScaler product report

August 2025

Also Known As

Lightning ADS

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall

Overview

A cloud-native, software-defined solution that provides integrated advanced load-balancing, performance optimization, application security and per-application analytics to increase operational agility and application performance.

A10 Networks

HAProxy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the fastest and most popular and trusted software load balancer products in the marketplace today. Organizations are able to immediately deploy HAProxy solutions to enable websites and applications to optimize performance, security, and observability. HAProxy solutions are available to scale to any environment.

HAProxy is an open-source product and has a robust, active, reliable community. The solutions are continually tested and improved on by the community. HAProxy offers a dynamic design to support the most modern architectures, microservices, and deployment environments (appliances, containers, virtual, and cloud).

HAProxy utilizes a cloud-native protocol, which makes it a complete solution for cloud services such as Red Hat OpenShift, OVH, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more. It also can be used as the reference load balancer in OpenStack.

HAProxy Products

HAProxy One: This is a next-gen end-to-end application delivery platform created to secure and streamline modern application architectures. It offers a complete suite of solutions, such as application delivery software, turnkey, and appliance services observed and administered through a central control plane. The product supplies application acceleration, CDN, DDoS, bot management, WAF capabilities, and load balancing.

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane: This product enables organizations to streamline workflows, arrange traffic routing and security protocols, enhance the speed of delivery, and scale out of the organization’s applications. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane offers an intuitive user interface to observe and control the complete product lineup and API for administering numerous fleets of HAProxy Enterprise servers, either in the cloud or on premises.

HAProxy Edge: This product offering is an application delivery network (ADN) that provides a broad array of turnkey application services with amazing scale and complete visibility. Services include application and content acceleration, advanced security, and load balancing.

HAProxy ALOHA Hardware or Virtual Load Balancer: This product is a virtual load balancer or plug-and-play hardware constructed upon HAProxy Enterprise that is designed to support proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7. It has a user-friendly GUI, simple deployment, and no limit on backend servers, making it a complete product for organizations desiring a reliable system to provide high-end load distribution for critical services.

HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller: This product is designed to facilitate smooth traffic flow into a Kubernetes cluster. It is able to automatically discover anomalies and changes in an organization's Kubernetes infrastructure and provide precise distribution of traffic to healthy pods, with no downtime caused by poor pod health or scaling changes. The product comes with an embedded WAF to optimize the security of an organization’s applications running in Kubernetes.

HAProxy Enterprise: This product is the enterprise-class edition of HAProxy offering a dynamic and sturdy code base with next-generation features, an enterprise suite of add-ons, professional services, and trusted support.
- Cluster-wide tracking and rate limiting
- Advanced DDoS and bot management
- Web application firewall
- Reliable expert support
- High performance modules
- Device detection and geolocation
- Real-time dashboard

Reviews from Real Users

“Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind.” - Nathanel S., Platform Architect at SES

“I use HAProxy for individuals who can not buy low balancers. I built NFV in a box and send individuals a pathway into an HAProxy VM. The setup was not difficult; it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC. When it comes to pricing, HAProxy is free.” - Nasir O., Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.

One platform for a consistent application delivery and security experience because nobody has time to learn multiple systems to manage ADC deployments. NetScaler is built with a single code base using a software-based architecture, so no matter which ADC form factor you choose — hardware, virtual machine, bare metal, or container — the behavior will be the same.

Sample Customers

Handle Financial

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp

ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk