Citrix Gateway and F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) compete in the network security and application delivery category. F5 BIG-IP APM appears to have the upper hand due to its superior features, particularly in handling complex security issues, which justifies its higher cost.
Features: Citrix Gateway offers features like load balancing, web app support, and a comprehensive Web Application Firewall (WAF) for secure app delivery. It provides flexibility through various deployment options including physical and virtual appliances. F5 BIG-IP APM shines with multifactor authentication, extensive protocol support, and powerful customization tools, making it ideal for complex enterprise needs.
Room for Improvement: Citrix Gateway could improve its multi-factor authentication and simplify the user interface. It faces complaints about service instability and cloud capability limitations. F5 BIG-IP APM could enhance cloud services and reporting features, and the initial setup process needs to be more intuitive to attract new users.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Citrix Gateway effectively supports on-premises and cloud deployments with mixed reviews on customer service effectiveness. F5 BIG-IP APM also supports on-premises and hybrid cloud setups and is praised for responsive customer service, although some users seek more rapid support and easier setups.
Pricing and ROI: Citrix Gateway is generally more affordable, offering subscription and purchase models, though some users find it costly. F5 BIG-IP APM is higher priced, reflecting premium features, with recent licensing simplifications. Both solutions deliver significant ROI by securing environments and preventing potential financial losses.
Citrix Gateway secures our environment from potential threats, which can save substantial financial resources, especially in preventing data breaches or ransomware attacks.
While there are multiple support tiers with priority response times of around 30 minutes, there appears to be a limitation in the number of technical teams who can immediately understand and resolve issues.
Most of the technical support is managed in-house due to our extensive experience with F5 products.
Even if they respond, they don't update me with the process or what's going on.
F5 technical support is responsive and helpful.
The solution features high availability, supporting both active-passive and active-active deployments to ensure constant product availability.
I believe that the scalability of Citrix Gateway depends on the project's requirements, as it can vary from simple load balancing to extensive Web Application Firewall implementations.
The product's flexibility and company culture contribute to resolving these challenges.
I would rate the scalability of F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) between seven and eight.
I find Citrix products to be very stable.
On a scale from one to ten for stability, I would rate F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) a ten.
Sometimes, the logs are not quite informational or easy to understand.
The main purpose of Citrix Gateway is to enforce the appropriate level of access to the correct user on the proper device under the correct conditions.
At this time it costs 35% more than other solutions.
If I could copy and paste objects instead of picking and configuring them from scratch each time, it would be great.
The main improvement needed for F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is to integrate into the cloud-delivered services from F5.
F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) does not have a direction for SaaS.
I consider Citrix Gateway to be an expensive solution, generally ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 yearly, depending on the model.
F5 products are more expensive than other solutions but are valued for their quality and reliability.
The product effectively helps me protect the organization's network from potential threats, thereby securing our environment from hackers and ransomware attacks.
It's easy to scale and easy to implement.
Secure SaaS access is particularly valuable as it ensures that SaaS-based applications are delivered securely.
APM is quite flexible for customers to use, providing secure remote access through various host-checking conditions for both machines and users.
It provides robust security and offers integration with multi-factor authentication systems, which is crucial for an organization's security policy.
A lot of features are useful to me, including mostly the authentication, SAML, or SSO, with no sign-on.
Citrix Gateway is a customer-managed solution that can be deployed on premises or on any public cloud, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. Citrix Gateway provides users with secure access and single sign-on to all the virtual, SaaS and web applications they need to be productive.
F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is an access management proxy solution for managing global access to the enterprise networks, cloud providers, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Through a single management interface, BIG-IP APM consolidates remote, mobile, network, virtual, and web access.
BIG-IP APM can also serve as a bridge between modern and classic authentication and authorization protocols and methods. For applications which are unable to support modern authentication and authorization protocols, like SAML and OAuth with OIDC, but which do support classic authentication methods, BIG-IP APM converts user credentials to the appropriate authentication standard supported by the application.
BIG-IP APM Benefits:
BIG-IP APM Features:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by BIG-IP APM users.
Mahmmoud Rabie, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, writes that BIG-IP APM is "A highly stable solution for load balancing, but the initial setup is complex."
Clyde Livingston, Senior Process Specialist at Telstra, says that BIG-IP APM is "Easy to use, useful access remotely, but lacking stability."
Chris Lam, Senior Solution Consultant at Macroview Telecom Limited, states that BIG-IP APM is "Useful for remote access VPN and VPI integration with VMware.
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