Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs NGINX Plus comparison

Barracuda Networks and F5 are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.0, while F5 is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.3. Barracuda Networks holds a 1.4% mindshare in ADC, compared to F5’s 7.9% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of F5 users who would recommend it.

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Read 5 Barracuda Load Balancer ADC reviews

519 Views
417 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

NGINX Plus

Read 31 NGINX Plus reviews

3,451 Views
2,936 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

NGINX Plus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC and NGINX Plus compete in the application delivery and load-balancing market. NGINX Plus generally holds the upper hand due to its superior performance and scalability features, making it ideal for those prioritizing these aspects.

Features: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC provides robust security features, comprehensive traffic management, and integration with various network environments. NGINX Plus offers high-performance load balancing, advanced application monitoring, and support for microservices architectures, providing flexibility and scalability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is known for its straightforward deployment and strong customer support, which aids setup. NGINX Plus, while more complex to deploy, benefits from extensive documentation and a vibrant community for support. Barracuda Load Balancer ADC has an advantage in ease of deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is a cost-effective solution with a favorable initial setup cost, leading to better ROI for small to medium enterprises. NGINX Plus, despite its higher initial cost, provides significant long-term benefits for larger organizations seeking tailored solutions, making it a worthwhile investment for those leveraging its full features.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. NGINX Plus Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. NGINX Plus

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 850,028 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:

Categories and Ranking

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

NGINX Plus

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is 1.4%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 7.9%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Roni Wijaya

Vice President of It Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

A simple and powerful solution with WAF feature

The solution is simple and powerful. I find the Barracuda Load Balancer ADC's load balancing function most valuable. It balances the traffic well. The security features, like the Web Application Firewall, are also very helpful. I use the SSL offloading feature too. It's very helpful because it prevents overload. Our application runs on HTTP, but we upload HTTPS on the load balancer. This means there are no performance issues. I think it's very helpful.

Read full review

Ritesh-Bakhru

Major Account Manager at Check Point Software

Quick installation and very easy to manage while doing orchestration or automation

NGINX cannot be a replacement for your traditional load balancer with what we use in the network today. However, with applications going toward microservices, NGINX is definitely a way forward. F5 has many traditional load balancing features, so they still need to bring some of those features to NGINX. NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5. I think F5 is trying to implement those features in NGINX so they can improve the balancing on NGINX, but I think that will take some time. With the traditional F5 set up, the same OS can do load balancing, firewalls, and even policy enforcement. If we are able to bring some of those capabilities to NGINX, I think it would become a versatile solution and usage would definitely increase.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The price is very good, and it's not very expensive."

"Barracuda's technical support is good - whenever we have an issue, they immediately connect and resolve it."

"The most useful features in Barracuda Load Balancer are its security capabilities, load balancing efficiency, and scalability."

"I would rate the stability of Barracuda Load Balancer as a ten out of ten; it has high stability."

"The solution is simple and powerful. I find the Barracuda Load Balancer ADC's load balancing function most valuable. It balances the traffic well. The security features, like the Web Application Firewall, are also very helpful."

"It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX."

"The best solution, by far, for web traffic control for things in production and just around the house."

"Application Gateway with application-level firewall tool and load distributor and balancer (also serves for A/B testing)."

"NGINX Plus' most valuable feature is the ingress controller."

"Nginx is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles."

"The most valuable features are the gateway and the ability to publish to sites."

"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."

"NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support."

More NGINX Plus pros

Cons

"The Barracuda Load Balancer ADC could be improved with more customization features. For example, F5 uses iRules for custom configurations. I haven't found something similar in Barracuda yet. The load balancer and WAF's basic and common features are enough, but we need more customization options."

"There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic."

"The quality of the solution's performance could be improved."

"There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic."

"Load Balancer ADC is competitively priced, but it's not feature-rich, and its technology is not that advanced."

"I would like it to have a more user-friendly graphical interface."

"NGINX Plus is moderately priced, but it could give better value for money."

"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."

"It would be good if NGINX provided a graphical user interface."

"They should do in the open source version of what they did to Advanced HTTP, TCP, and UDP load balancing."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."

"The solution needs to be easier to setup and deploy."

"I would like the configuration process to be more simplified."

More NGINX Plus cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Load Balancer ADC is cost-effective and is about half the price of F5."

"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."

"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."

"NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it."

"It's an open source solution, so it's free."

"NGINX Plus is an open-source solution with limited additional features. When you try to get additional features in the solution, then you need to pay an extra amount to NGINX Plus."

"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours."

"There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free."

"Compared to other similar solutions on the market, I think it's over-priced."

"I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost."

More NGINX Plus 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.

See recommendations

850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

22%

Retailer

10%

Educational Organization

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

Pricing for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC can be a consideration. However, it offers good value with its cost-saving benefits and efficient operation, balancing the initial financial outlay.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

There are areas of Barracuda Load Balancer's security that have room for improvement, particularly concerning handling traffic. Also, more could be done to enhance the initial setup, as it can be c...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

The typical use case for Barracuda Load Balancer ADC involves managing and distributing network traffic efficiently to maintain system performance. Clients use Barracuda Load Balancer ADC for its a...

See all answers

Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?

IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architecture can handle the most demanding tasks. From media streaming to web applications,...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX Plus?

It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?

My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.

See all answers

Comparisons

NetScaler vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Compared 36% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Compared 29% of the time

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Compared 13% of the time

HAProxy vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Compared 12% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Compared 11% of the time

More Barracuda Load Balancer ADC Competitors

IIS vs NGINX Plus

Compared 17% of the time

HAProxy vs NGINX Plus

Compared 15% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs NGINX Plus

Compared 11% of the time

NetScaler vs NGINX Plus

Compared 11% of the time

Apache Web Server vs NGINX Plus

Compared 10% of the time

More NGINX Plus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

Download Barracuda Load Balancer ADC product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX Plus

April 2025

Download NGINX Plus product report

Also Known As

Barracuda Load Balancer

NGINX

Overview

Barracuda Load Balancer is ideal for organizations looking for a high-performance, yet cost-effective application delivery and security solution. With the broadest range of hardware and virtual models, Barracuda Load Balancer provides maximum flexibility for organizations looking to build highly secure and scalable application infrastructure, whether it's deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

Barracuda Networks

NGINX Plus is a versatile solution that offers load balancing, caching, proxying, and API deployment capabilities. It can be deployed on private or public clouds and is ideal for building CDN solutions. The solution can also be used to secure web applications and replace web services like Apache.

NGINX has helped organizations improve functioning, reduce downtimes, and offer a DevOps-friendly solution. Its community support and documentation are highly regarded, and its configuration is more straightforward, making it a recommended choice over HAProxy.

Sample Customers

Fenwal Blood Technologies

Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. NGINX Plus

April 2025

Free Report: Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. NGINX Plus

Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. NGINX Plus report.

See our list of best Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) vendors.

We monitor all Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.