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Cloudflare vs NetScaler comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
NetScaler
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (1st), Network Management Applications (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Cloudflare is designed for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection and holds a mindshare of 19.6%, up 19.2% compared to last year.
NetScaler, on the other hand, focuses on Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), holds 14.4% mindshare, down 15.9% since last year.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking
Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"Citrix NetScaler offers robust security features, including SmartAccess and customizable policies, making it a reliable choice for safeguarding user data."
"My customers have told me that the performance of this solution is good."
"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."
"Compared to other solutions, Citrix ADC is much more robust in terms of the native integration to cloud platforms. It is far more robust from an operational point of view as well."
"It's very easy to configure."
"The most valuable features are the VDA Delivery, Gateway Fort, and the load balancing."
"Its flexibility, agility, and robustness are the most valuable. Its management and implementation are also quite easy."
 

Cons

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Technical support could be improved."
"Does not include security. A web application firewall would be a nice addition."
"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."
"It was challenging explaining to customers that it's no longer NetScaler but ADC, and now it's not just ADC but also the rebranding from NetScaler."
"The main areas for improvement would be around documentation and support. If a feature can be used in two or three ways, show that feature being used in all of those ways. Documentation seems to only cover the primary use case and leaves you to either run through trial and error or consult the user community. In terms of support, I have never actually had them solve any of my issues. I have always solved them myself and then provided the resolution to support."
"Maybe creating policies with simple regular expressions."
"We face challenges with the solution's firmware upgrades frequently."
"The WAF component needs to be simplified so that it is easier to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"We are using the free version."
"The price is reasonable."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"There isn't much of a difference between the cost of Citrix and that of other similar solutions."
"F5 BIG-IP is much more expensive than Citrix ADC. For example, If we choose two platforms, Citrix ADC, 3000 version, and we choose F5, F4200 version. F5 BIG-IP has connections, timers, and throughput similar to Citrix ADC, but the price is very expensive."
"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"We are quite happy with price. It's not too high."
"Regarding pricing, while it's expensive, I can't comment on the exact ROI without a budget analysis. However, in terms of service quality, it's worth the price."
"Citrix Web App and API Protection are in the middle when we talk about pricing and licensing"
"The licenses for this product are payable as a yearly subscription, and carry a high price-point. The subscription scheme is quite complicated, and costs will increase with each additional feature that is required, outside of the basic setup."
"Its licensing cost is much higher than other products, but it is acceptable because it is a one-time investment, and we are getting our requirements fulfilled when we buy this product. So, there is no issue with the pricing."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Educational Organization
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What do you like most about Citrix ADC?
The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic enters our environment.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADC?
After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more expensive.
What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?
Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexity. While it could be easier to manage, it is like transitioning from driving a ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: March 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.