We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), 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)."Easy, user-friendly setup with content switching and integrated caching features."
"The solution improves security performance."
"The flexibility in configuration options is impressive."
"Provides resiliency for applications that reside on servers, as well as connectivity to remote applications."
"My customers have told me that the performance of this solution is good."
"I found that the GUI was very easy to to navigate. If you were looking for something, it was fairly easy to find. There's a lot of third-party documentation and information available online as well."
"It is simple for both IT specialists and customers."
"The most valuable feature of Citrix ADC is its ease of use."
"Currently, it's distributing the load perfectly, as per my understanding of our requirements."
"Its user interface is very easy to use on a day-to-day basis. It is very user-friendly."
"In terms of stability, it is stable."
"It can determine if the system is going down, then route the traffic somewhere else."
"The F5 GTM/BIGIP DNS (Global Traffic Manager) is a valuable feature. This feature allows for DNS load balancing, which means that high availability and load sharing can be done across services locally, as well as across datacenters with advanced capabilities."
"The solution is very easy to use and easy to understand. It's quite an intuitive system."
"The v11 clustering is a new technology they have brought in that does not require improvement. They are the leader in it."
"BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration."
"The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this."
"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."
"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."
"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."
"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 support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."
"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."
"The product provides some templates to integrate with applications like MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, SAP Enterprise Portal, and others. However, the last update for these templates was 2013 (lots of applications are running on versions newer then 2013)."
"I think the documentation should be improved."
"Quality assurance could improve by ironing out security vulnerabilities before releasing upgrades."
"Some of our customers have questioned the security of this solution lately, wondering whether it is safe or not, so enhancements in this respect would be good."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the user interface because sometimes it can be complicated."
"We face challenges with the solution's firmware upgrades frequently."
"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."
"The one gap I saw was that pure LBN integration is a little tricky. The insertion of F5 in LBN is a little tricky. They need to work on something, on products by which they can insert F5 in any sort of cloud environment."
"We would like to see load balancing between the cloud and the on-premise, a straightforward deployment feature."
"BIG-IP LTM is taking a long time to mature in cloud environments. They plan to improve cloud integration in the next version, but it isn't out yet. It's essential because more companies are moving to the cloud these days and using things like Kubernetes or microservices. F5 needs to improve in that direction, and they are."
"The pricing could always be better. It's a bit expensive."
"The solution could improve the documentation."
"This is a very expensive solution."
"It would possibly help to get more training, even better in local languages."
"The solution's hardware quality needs improvement."
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."
"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"The configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer."
"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."
"There are three main areas to improve: 1) Make remote management more modern by adding API. 2) Propose a general HA solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this). 3) Thread option should be a bit more stable."
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