Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs NetScaler comparison

Barracuda Networks and NetScaler are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #32 with an average rating of 6.0, while NetScaler is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3. Additionally, 75% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of NetScaler users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

NetScaler and Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service compete in the web application firewall arena. Barracuda often has an advantage due to its cloud-native architecture offering cost-effectiveness and adaptability to evolving threats.

Features: NetScaler provides high-performance load balancing, application delivery control, and integrated analytics, ideal for large enterprises. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service ensures seamless integration with public clouds, easy configuration, and continuous updates, suitable for businesses seeking flexibility.

Room for Improvement: NetScaler can enhance its cloud compatibility and simplify its hardware-dependent deployments. Additionally, improving its customer support response times could be beneficial. Barracuda could improve its advanced traffic management features, expand third-party integrations, and enhance its detailed analytics capabilities for larger enterprises.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Barracuda's cloud-based deployment simplifies setup and maintenance, coupled with 24/7 support ideal for businesses transitioning to WAF protection. NetScaler requires more complex and hardware-intensive deployment, which can extend setup time and demand substantial IT resources.

Pricing and ROI: NetScaler typically requires higher upfront investment due to hardware costs and complex setup, impacting ROI. Barracuda's subscription-based pricing allows scalability without significant capital expenditure, often resulting in better ROI over shorter periods, making it attractive for businesses seeking immediate cost savings.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NetScaler Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NetScaler

April 2025

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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

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Hadar Eshel

Co-Founder and CEO at Cloudway

Easy to install platform with valuable policy management features

We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy. Additionally, it could operate in a local data center.…

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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.

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

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."

More Cloudflare pros

"I like its ability to identify known attacks, including DDOS attacks. It's valuable because software must be able to stop known attacks. Application attacks are evolving all the time. When it comes to software-as-a-service, we need to have software that knows about all the latest attacks. It should also protect against major unknown attacks."

"The most valuable features of the solution are it is plug and play, has automated policies, a simple configuration, and is easy to create rules."

"It provides an ease of policy management."

"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"

"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."

"I would say the rewriting and redirection functions are must-have's for us."

"One of its most valuable features is fundamental load balancing, supporting both basic load balancing and database teams."

"An 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."

"This solution allows the user to easily scale out application delivery, and provides secure remote access."

"I prefer this solution because of its user-friendly interface. I find it simple and close to what I am currently using, which is Citrix Fortiva Access for Multi-Factor Authentication. I appreciate the familiar user interface and troubleshooting tools it offers."

"Most of the functions are user-friendly and great."

"Provides resiliency for applications that reside on servers, as well as connectivity to remote applications."

"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."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

More Cloudflare cons

"We found it a bit slow when accessing it through the web browser. The URL also exposed the user name and the hashed password. When I log into my Barracuda WAF user portal, I could see the username and the hashed password on the URL itself. So, it is not very secure, and it is important to take that off."

"The stability of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"It's a very specific solution that is only requested for a customer's web code or their global IT policy."

"The solution can improve by bundling Security Operation Center (SOC) with the WAF-as-a-Service, it would provide a lot more value to customers."

"One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy."

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

"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."

"The technical support could be better. Whenever I contacted support, I rarely got the solution that we needed. And most of the time, I finished fixing the problem by looking on the internet or by finding documents about the problem on Google."

"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."

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

"It does not have a sandbox cloud service and antivirus. It should have on-prem or cloud sandboxing and antivirus."

"Its GUI should be improved. Its CLI is powerful, but GUI needs more features."

"The customization has always been a key area where some improvements are required. In the beginning, everything was for customizing the outer shell of it. You had to use the command-based utility and you had to do a lot of manual work. They have improved it a little bit and now there are some GUI-based functionalities that can be used. However, more can be done that doesn't require a lot of intervention. Right now there are some features, there are some customizations that can be done, but it's still very tedious, very cumbersome, a lot of work. So that could be simplified."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"I rate the product's price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high. There are no additional costs to be paid apart from the standard licensing fees attached to the solution."

"The product is expensive but it offers flexible pricing. It could be affordable."

"It's very difficult for me to give an estimate of the cost. All I know is that we sell the box itself as a service."

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

"The licenses for this product are payable as a yearly subscription, and carry a high price-point. The subscription scheme is quite complicated, and costs will increase with each additional feature that is required, outside of the basic setup."

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

"We get value for money. Its price is fair. I don't think it is overpriced."

"F5 BIG-IP is much more expensive than Citrix ADC. For example, If we choose two platforms, Citrix ADC, 3000 version, and we choose F5, F4200 version. F5 BIG-IP has connections, timers, and throughput similar to Citrix ADC, but the price is very expensive."

"It is true that it is a bit pricey compared to newer technologies coming to the market. For example, A10 is a load balancer that does everything that Citrix can and it does a lot more than what NetScaler does when it comes to the security space, and their prices are so cheap. Every box comes with its own license and support built into it. When you compare that with NetScaler, you have to buy licenses separately, you have to buy a support agreement that is going to be separate. A small NetScaler, even if it is a VPX which is a virtual server, could cost you close to $150,000 to $200,000 dollars. So the pricing is really high."

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

"I give the price of the solution a seven out of ten."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

20%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

15%

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What do you like most about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

It provides an ease of policy management.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strateg...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?

We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

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

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 87% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service

Compared 13% of the time

More Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 11% of the time

HAProxy vs NetScaler

Compared 11% 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

More NetScaler Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

Download Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service product report

Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

April 2025

Download NetScaler product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Barracuda WAF as a Service

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

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is a comprehensive solution designed to provide application security, DDoS protection, SSL authentication, protocol support, and application delivery. It is a plug-and-play solution with automated policies, simple configuration, and easy rule creation.

The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system based on email protection with cloud security. It is also a web application firewall and covers major protection and threat management functions. With Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, customers can ensure the security of their web code and comply with global IT policies.

Barracuda Networks

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.

NetScaler

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Salvation Army

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

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NetScaler

April 2025

Free Report: Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NetScaler

Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. NetScaler and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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