We performed a comparison between Barracuda Load Balancer ADC, Citrix NetScaler, and HAProxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Citrix, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)."Barracuda's technical support is good - whenever we have an issue, they immediately connect and resolve it."
"The price is very good, and it's not very expensive."
"Citrix NetScaler offers robust security features, including SmartAccess and customizable policies, making it a reliable choice for safeguarding user data."
"One feature that works really well is the SSL VPN. It's very easy to set up and you can go very granular with it. You can define what user groups get what kind of access and the management overhead is very low."
"The solution improves security performance."
"For desktop application management, I recommend the NetScaler edition. This product is like a Swiss army knife. Citrix NetScaler ADC supports the education front-end."
"It's very easy to configure."
"I like app flows and custom flows. They integrate with multiple flows."
"Easy, user-friendly setup with content switching and integrated caching features."
"Citrix Netscaler makes it easy to provide services to end users, offering better visibility into user sessions compared to VMware. However, instability in network or machine can cause headaches as it's hard to pinpoint issues. SSL offload feature enhances security posture by providing secure connectivity between end users and backend systems. We use additional Azure remote security solutions for comprehensive protection."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."
"Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind."
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice."
"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."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"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 quality of the solution's performance could be improved."
"Load Balancer ADC is competitively priced, but it's not feature-rich, and its technology is not that advanced."
"Scripting and writing expressions need to be improved by putting logic behind the rules and improve policies involving some of the scripting part, which is a tedious task to do."
"Citrix ADC can be really complex. It isn't very simple like some other appliances that I've worked with. You need a lot of skill and experience to manage it. I'm not talking about a year or two. You need at least four years to understand it very well. It is not that easy to learn. They should make it a lot simpler for users to understand the management of it. They can also provide some additional training. The material they have on the site is not sufficient enough for you to understand how to manage it. Their training is expensive, and not everyone has the funds and experience for it. Citrix isn't very popular around these parts of the world. So, it can use some more marketing, sales, enlightenment, and advertisement. These could bring more market for them. Basically, there are just a few companies that really go for Citrix. Most of the companies go for VMware because they marketed themselves more than Citrix. There isn't much difference between Citrix and VMware. VMware is a little more robust than Citrix. Citrix has focused more on desktops rather than server virtualization, and that's the advantage VMware has over Citrix. Citrix also needs to educate and inform users about the infrastructure that is supported with a version. Currently, if the customers don't look at the datasheet, they might miss this important information."
"The solution should be able to scale more effectively than it does."
"An area for improvement would be the difficulty in finding information about standard licensing costs over the internet. They should provide some reference prices on the net to be quickly referred to."
"I would like to see support for scripting, like "iRule", which gives you the option to implement any configuration which is not available out of the box."
"The solution can improve their support and send tickets directly to a Citrix ADC engineer in order to avoid having to escalate each support call."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the user interface because sometimes it can be complicated."
"I will try to migrate all the tools to the cloud because there is more lab and more VPN scalability available in the cloud. It is not available on-premises."
"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"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."
"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."
"They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers. Also, they need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration."
"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."
"I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit"
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"The visibility could be improved."
