We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), and NGINX Plus based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Citrix, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).
"I can turn on features without actually owning a license. I can test them out, I can use them for a while, and then I can be licensed up. That's awesome. I don't have to have a license immediately before I can start to deploy things rapidly, rapid deployment is a plus."
"One of the most beneficial features for application delivery is its integration with Citrix Storefront, facilitating user logins and ensuring continuity during data center outages."
"If you need PCI-compliance and have high security requirements, WAF is the most valuable feature. If you need to monitor your load-balancing services with complex types of monitoring, make sure everything is alright, and load balancing is important, Content Switching and Monitoring features are the keys to your needs. If you want to provide a lot of static images or data, the Caching feature works best for you."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN."
"NetScaler Gateway: Why? Availability/Security: We delivered more than 200 applications thru Xenapp. This feature give us the possibility to deliver the applications anywhere. Currently, 30% of access is made through our NetScaler Gateway (Internet connections)."
"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 solution improves security performance."
"SSL Offload"
"Initial setup was straightforward. We were up and running in three hours."
"it has TCP LAN and WAN optimization features. It has has caching."
"The iRule feature is very useful for inspecting HTTP. Sometimes, we use it for modifying the headers of the HTTP."
"The detail that you have available when setting up iRules."
"The solution has good load balancing capabilities."
"One of the best features of the solution is the operating system."
"It also has an AVR feature: application, visibility, and recording. It's good for customers looking for what is actually happening in their network and where the latency is."
"It can determine if the system is going down, then route the traffic somewhere else."
"The load balancing module, which is equivalent to LTM, is the focus of the PSE. So far, the features of both are identical. I believe NGINX has more features for securing these services, but in terms of load balancing, both are massive solutions."
"The web proxy and the database proxy are excellent."
"NGINX works much better than HAProxy in our current hardware and architecture for HTTP/HTTPS load balancing. "
"I think installation only took a couple of minutes — no more than 10 minutes."
"Using NGINX Plus for web traffic distribution is fantastic. It offers performance similar to physical load balancers but with added flexibility."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is simple to configure."
"Zero Downtime has always been a strength in recommending infrastructure web services. NGINX allows me to execute such infrastructure with less complications and the ability to switch from server to server easily."
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"Its GUI should be improved. Its CLI is powerful, but GUI needs more features."
"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."
"Currently, it is not easy to use the configuration capabilities of the product."
"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."
"Should offer more flexible cost-effective licensing for small to medium sized organizations."
"Reducing the overhead required for AppFlow data collection, specifically for HDX Insight, would be a huge improvement."
"Getting to use some of the advanced tools, even with the assistance of Citrix support, can be challenging."
"We had some bugs in the previous firmware. These were not big issues, but more testing on the firmware would be key to happier customers."
"We need best-practice information. They have something called DevCentral and a blog. But we want something from F5 itself regarding how to tackle the false-positive configurations. If you go into detail with so many configurations it will find so many false positives from the moment it is enabled that it will quickly impact your applications, and it will not work."
"The analytics should provide insight into latency across various traffic routes and virtual servers."
"I think the logging could be improved."
"The solution could improve the documentation."
"The solution could improve the ease of use, the management could be simplified. Other solutions are easier to use."
"There are issues with F5 BIG-IP but they are minor issues not affecting production and services. Sometimes the operations and the facility systems fail. However, there is an alert action from the windows. An ordeal for the manager."
"There is a need for a more modular version to concentrate on the current monolithic structure of both the virtual and hardware versions."
"To improve the product, they could add more load balancing solutions in Kubernetes."
"Our most challenging part was to run an older PHP website reverse-proxied through NGINX. That was not fun."
"The biggest room for improvement would be to allow NGINX Core machines to cluster for memory zones in some way with a plug and play module. "
"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."
"NGINX Plus is moderately priced, but it could give better value for money."
"The KPI should be more focused on load balancing and the latency in application calling from the end system."
"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."
"Only improvement needed that I would point to is scalability. With it, I mean clusterized organisation on a low level. At the moment, the best alternative is RHEL HA."
"The user interface could be improved."
More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Pricing and Cost Advice →
