We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), and Fortinet FortiADC based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Citrix, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).
"The solution is easy to work with and manage."
"The GSLB feature allows us to move services between data centers. We can do this in either a planned or unplanned manner. We have experienced service provider outages at our primary data center and GSLB will kick in to automatically modify DNS records to point to a secondary data center (active/passive). We also make use of GeoIP information to point clients to the closest data center for accessing applications."
"The load balancing and VPN features are most valuable. AAA authentication is also valuable."
"HTTP analysis and action. We have a lot of custom web applications that sometimes require custom header insertions. Some of these custom apps are external and, via the content switching, we can use one IP and leverage various back-end web app servers."
"Unified Gateway allows me to provide secure external access to applications for suppliers and customers while requiring Multi-Factor Authentication."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is load balancing."
"The most valuable feature of Citrix ADC is its ease of use."
"The solution is very easy to use and easy to understand. It's quite an intuitive system."
"It makes the publishing of applications to the Internet safer."
"You can create multiple virtual servers on F5 BIG-IP technology, and within multiple virtual servers you can have multiple nodes, where a node equals two application servers."
"The most valuable feature is the proxy."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Currently, it's distributing the load perfectly, as per my understanding of our requirements."
"In terms of stability, it is stable."
"I have found F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to be stable."
"Key features include SSL Offloading, VM availability, and L7 load balancing."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL offloading capacity."
"From a technical perspective, it is the most scalable device from Fortinet."
"The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily."
"Because ADC is the intermediary between the servers and the end-user application, it gives thorough information about the traffic, what the problem is."
"The product has flexible and interesting licensing options."
"Although FortiADC has multiple features that I like, the global DNS is the most helpful. It is primarily useful for customers with huge environments and at least two data centers. FortiADC can act as your DNS server. It can check which data center has the lowest latency, and route traffic to that one. It's an intelligent DNS."
"Simple to use and easy to integrate."
"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."
"Citrix should improve the documentation. It is not really clear how to set up many features to our advantage. When we setup Citrix NetScaler ADC, we have to figure it out by ourselves without a lot of documentation."
"The security is okay, but the monitoring and reporting need improvement."
"Overall the price of Citrix ADC could be more competitive."
"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."
"Technical support could be improved."
"ADC from Citrix has added functionalities from other products and the usability is very difficult for someone who is used to a simpler user interface, it's a little bit of a mess to use."
"Improvements are needed to address the issue of machines becoming unregistered, ensuring stability for end users. Troubleshooting with Citrix support can be challenging, so clearer diagnostics would be beneficial. As for global server load balancing, it works well on-premises, depending on user volume and service stability. Overall, it's satisfactory for us."
"It's a very expensive solution."
"It would possibly help to get more training, even better in local languages."
"The deployment can take some time because you can do a lot of configuring to meet the needs of the use cases for clients."
"The solution's initial setup process was quite complex. I"
"I'm not very sure about the security with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). We have our own private data center, but we are going to migrate our private data center into the Azure cloud environment. Security will then be a major concern when we migrate our own whole infrastructure to the public cloud."
"The user experience for dashboards and reports can be improved. They should make dashboards and the reporting system easier for users. They need to add more reports to the dashboard. Currently, for complicated reports, I have to do the customization. It should have more integration with network firewalls to be able to gather all the information required for traffic management."
"To improve the product, they could add more load balancing solutions in Kubernetes."
"There is room for improvement in the user interface."
"I had a terrible experience with Fortinet support. I only used support once when I bought the solution. I got no response for two days. However, I believe that it's no longer the case. Fortinet solutions have problems when they're launched. For example, we had issues with Fortinet's authenticator when it came out. We also had trouble with FortiNAC in the beginning."
"It would be good if they built in a fully functional web application firewall."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"Setup could be easier. The company's homework is to redesign those menus to configure with the smallest number of steps."
"Fortinet has some drawbacks, and it can be a bit challenging to scale."
"The product's stability for VMs could be better."
"The solution should improve finding false positives and false negatives. There are a lot of false positives."
"Fortinet FortiADC should include an advanced-level SD-WAN."
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