We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, HAProxy, and Kemp LoadMaster 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 program is easy to install and to set up."
"For NetScaler, our major use cases are database load balancing, PowerVPN VPN access gateway, WAF (Web Application Firewall), and content switching."
"SSL Offload"
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Citrix ADC is its ease of use."
"The MAS integration for HDX Insight has provided teams with significant visibility into network performance of the user's connection."
"From a security standpoint, It is a comprehensive solution in a single box."
"What I like most about Citrix NetScaler is its stability, and I didn't see a lot of issues with it."
"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."
"The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime."
"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is that it works for my use case of application load balancing. I'm using it for PeerSense, and it's easy enough for PeerSense."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"The most valuable feature is the load balancing and allowing for high availability of our web services."
"Managing and maintaining multiple servers is done in a single place."
"The feature that allows us to easily disconnect a server when we need and bring back online is the most valuable. It's a click of a button. This allows us to keep all systems up. We can then run updates, perform reboots whatever we need to one of the servers without taking production down."
"The security features, load balancing, built-in templates, and the easy to implement virtual IPs are great."
"Edge Security Pack is valuable because of the way it separates between critical infrastructure and the public internet."
"It has been functional. We don't have any outages."
"The most valuable feature so far has been the high-availability options that allowed us to add an additional Kemp LoadMaster VLM virtual appliance into our VMware vSphere environment, to provide failover for our existing LoadMaster."
"It has greatly fortified the performance and uptime of our front-door email ingress, simplified and segmented mail routing, and reduced admin overhead for mail issue resolution and troubleshooting."
"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."
"The licensing model and technical support of the solution could be improved."
"The SLB could be better, and they should improve it."
"Overall the price of Citrix ADC could be more competitive."
"Getting to use some of the advanced tools, even with the assistance of Citrix support, can be challenging."
"We have issues with the certificates. All authorization processes need certificates, however, every three months we needed to change certificates. This process iss complicated for us because Citrix does not have a not user-friendly interface and does not off user-friendly services. This needs a lot of improvement."
"Technical support could be improved."
"Scripting and writing expressions need to be improved by putting logic behind the rules and improve policies involving some of the scripting part, which is a tedious task to do."
"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 HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."
"They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers. Also, they need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration."
"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."
"The web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible)."
"The visibility could be improved."
"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."
"Overall, the Kemp LoadMaster has been an all-rounder great product and stable. The free trial and virtual edition make it a breeze for any potential customer to give it a spin before actually deciding to put it on the infrastructure or even talk to the CFO."
"In the web interface, there are a lot of settings in the different menus and it would be helpful if there were an interactive help system or tooltips to help the administrators find and configure the right settings."
"I definitely think that the WAF can be improved."
"It has all types of logs and they are very detailed, but it's a little bit hard to search for a single event."
"In the next release, Kemp should include the ability for LoadMaster to create different DNS record types."
"Perhaps Kemp could offer some training videos."
"In my opinion, the layer seven loads balancing that we're mainly using for web servers, doesn't seem to pick up when there are issues at the application level."
"In the next release, they can introduce 360 views in the same dashboard to make it easier for users to view. The graphical information should be displayed on the dashboard."
