We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, Fortinet FortiADC, 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)."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 web application firewalling component is a powerful feature."
"It has helped us to increase the resiliency of the application and the performance."
"The best feature of Citrix is its track record of stability in its features."
"For NetScaler, our major use cases are database load balancing, PowerVPN VPN access gateway, WAF (Web Application Firewall), and content switching."
"What I like most about Citrix NetScaler is its stability, and I didn't see a lot of issues with it."
"Load Balancing and SSL offloading are key features."
"The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic enters our environment."
"From a technical perspective, it is the most scalable device from Fortinet."
"The most valuable feature is its simplicity."
"The GSLB, the DR side, is the best part. Because we had our main side in one city, we created another, and we had a complete MPLS over the internet. We used the GSLB and data loss for our business applications."
"Ease of use in deploying and having it up and running requires minimal knowledge."
"Simple to use and easy to integrate."
"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."
"The main feature that we use is GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing). GSLB makes the customer's network more reliable by scaling applications across multiple datacenters. GSLB as a disaster recovery solution can direct traffic based on site availability."
"It's a good product because it supports all the features that ADC solutions in the market can support, like F5 solutions, for example, such as the LTM of F5."
"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."
"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"The solution is user-friendly and efficient."
"Stability is number one."
"The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB-algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none."
"The features I find valuable in this solution are session control which automatically disconnects users that forget to log off, and the ability to write rules to either allow or block certain file requests."
"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."
"Citrix NetScaler has been recently acquired by another company and the support has been negatively impacted, the solution is at its end of life. The support for the solution could improve. The sales team needs to be improved."
"The technical support could be improved. They do not respond or assist customers in a timely manner."
"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."
"The interface needs to be improved because the competition is coming up with ones that are more eye-catching, straightforward, and sophisticated."
"The GUI should be improved."
"Citrix ADC can improve if it provides a more user-friendly interface and clear working protocols. Citrix is not working with classic RFC, it is working with Citrix RFC, which is not common in the world. If engineers of Citrix can provide us with more information on working with the classic IP networks it would be a benefit."
"The solution could be more secure."
"The L7 Persistent load-balancing algorithm has not worked for me after having tested it many times with my customer's in-house application. I'd like to suggest that the company make sure that all load-balancing algorithms work properly with most applications, even those that are in-house apps."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"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."
"The product's stability for VMs could be better."
"Fortinet has some drawbacks, and it can be a bit challenging to scale."
"There is a mismatch between the number of features they are offering and the device capacity on how much it can handle."
"Technical support and documentation could both be improved."
"The user interface could be more friendly and CLI could be more like that of Fortigate."
"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"Improving the documentation with multiple examples and scenarios would be beneficial. Most users encounter similar situations, so having a variety of scenarios readily available on the tool's website would be helpful. For instance, if I were part of the HAProxy team, I'd create a webpage with different scenarios and provide files for each scenario. This way, users wouldn't have to start from scratch every time."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"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."
"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."
