F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall vs VMWare Avi Load Balancer comparison

F5 and Ivanti are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. F5 is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.0, while Ivanti is ranked #16. F5 holds a 14.3% mindshare in ADC, compared to Ivanti’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Ivanti users who would recommend it.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...

Read 124 F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) reviews

7,414 Views
5,412 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Ivanti Virtual Web Applicat...

665 Views
439 Comparison Views

VMWare Avi Load Balancer

Read 10 VMWare Avi Load Balancer reviews

1,959 Views
1,939 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...

Ivanti Virtual Web Applicat...

VMWare Avi Load Balancer

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall, and VMWare Avi Load Balancer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about F5, NetScaler, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is 14.3%, down from 15.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall is 1.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMWare Avi Load Balancer is 5.4%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)	14.3%
VMWare Avi Load Balancer	5.4%
Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall	1.7%
Other	78.6%

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

edshyaa

Network Engineer at Stryker

Load balancing has improved traffic distribution and currently supports high availability upgrades

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) offers effective load balancing methods that help distribute traffic across our servers, whether we have two or several. This load balancing feature stands out as it is the fundamental work we do with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). While I recognize there are many features, such as iRules, which I have not explored yet, we primarily work on VIPs, pool members, and traffic distribution. The load balancing algorithms' flexibility makes them very useful for our team, enabling us to choose different servers and manage load effectively. We use various methods based on user or application requirements, making the algorithms set up by F5 in the backend quite helpful. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) positively impacts our organization primarily through its load balancing capabilities. We avoid traffic overload on individual servers by placing backend servers behind F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) VIP. This load balancing helps us manage traffic effectively. Since the configuration of the I-series, we have had smooth performance, and with the recent migration to the R-series, it is working faster than before, providing positive outcomes for our operations. Since moving to the R-series, I notice improved performance; it is user-friendly and handles traffic efficiently. The upgrading process is different as we create tenants and a main host. R-series has better CPU and memory, leading to higher throughput with minimal downtime, making it a significant improvement over the I-series.

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Mike Duffy

Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Good feature set and is simple to deploy

In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered. We've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else. We sort of stopped deploying them because of that. There are additional costs to the standard licensing. There are bandwidth prices. The feature set is quite good. We've been told to stop using them because of the price. If they can do something to address that I believe it would be better. On the latest version they've got a community edition, which is quite a good bandwidth, but in essence, it's to address the entry-level price. When you get to 10 gig bandwidth, it's way too expensive.

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reviewer2273484

Pre Sales at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Struggled with rising costs and limited value while managing internal traffic

The issue with load balancers is that they are all the same. I would rate it seven. I do not recall VMWare Avi Load Balancer having WAF protection. We use WAF and for this specific case, we use F5. It is not about VMWare Avi Load Balancer itself. For multi-cloud capability, you need to do NSX Extended and HCX in VMware. This is what will give you the flavor of multi-cloud. Others will be resources because once you reach NSX Extended, all resources will be under one cloud management. So it does not matter. It is not a feature in VMWare Avi Load Balancer that would be responsible for multi-cloud capability. Multi-cloud capability comes from a configuration called NSX Extended. It is very expensive. The pricing is expensive in that it is only an add-on. From my opinion, they should lower the price.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In terms of our primary use cases, all our web services, our main web portals, and our TV service sit behind the F5, so any customer would have to traverse our F5 for the services at the back of it."

"We can load balance the request to servers, which was the main reason we bought the product."

"The benefit is security; it's able to track issues and attacks, enabling us to catch the attacks before they hit us."

"It makes the publishing of applications to the Internet safer."

"F5 Big-IP Local Traffic Manager has better modular features especially LTM, which according to the clients, is very beneficial, and most of the users opt for a combination of Big-IP LTM and WAF which helps them to leverage application load balancing and enhance application security many-fold."

"Most important is that it stops very common attacks which can be performed by a simple hacker, and up to the advanced level."

"BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration."

"I think F5's tech support may be better than Citrix's because they mainly focus on the ADC product, but Citrix support covers Hypervisor, XenMobile, FAS, and ADC. And from my experience, sometimes, we face some issues that Citrix cannot handle."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pros

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is simple to deploy. The deployment took us ten minutes."

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is simple to deploy."

"The interface and software features are the most valuable aspects of this solution."

"The solution is entirely virtual, SDDC technologies drive it, and the integration with other projects is compelling."

"The solution has simplified our network infrastructure management."

"What's most valuable in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its deployment capability, the ability to deploy in a dispersed service, with the service engines that can disperse and have a single control plane that can control the load balancing services across any available platform, wherever needed. The analytics of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer and flexibility of deployment are its most valuable features and the reasons why many people buy it."

"The interface and software features are the most valuable aspects of this solution."

"The most valuable feature of the solution for my organization is its UI since it allows us to see the clusters while providing a very specific and good overall understanding."

"The solution is stable."

"It is more common in the market, so it is easier to use because it is more common."

More VMWare Avi Load Balancer pros

Cons

"The price should be reduced because it is expensive when compared to the competition."

"When WAF is enabled, you can see a decrease in performance."

"The pricing of the product is a bit too high."

"LTM's cloud capabilities could be improved. Cloud providers all offer load balancing, but you can't get the same level of security. F5's cloud service is still not on par with its on-prem service."

"I wouldn't recommend the tool to small companies, considering its high price and the infrastructure needs of small businesses."

"I think the logging could be improved."

"If we decide to migrate to the cloud, I don't think that BIG-IP is a good solution and we probably won't use it."

"I would like them to expand load balancing, being able to go across multiple regions to on-premise and into the cloud. This could use improvement, as it is sometimes a little cumbersome."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) cons

"In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered. We've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered; we've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else."

"It doesn't match the development structure or user community of our existing product. It pales in comparison to that."

"In terms of improvement, the pricing and documentation need improvement. We have had problems getting the documents."

"I did not go with it because their APM module is a different product altogether. It's a common thing that companies do. They sell something and then they add on top of it as a different product. It is a type of marketing strategy. But when it comes to the overall management, it takes a lot of time to really look into it."

"The product could be improved in terms of security features. For example, IDS and IPS sites need to be more progressive."

"Avi Networks Software Load Balancer needs to improve its documentation."

"Avi Networks is great. It could be good for a small company, but for the whole municipality, it's just not good enough."

"The initial setup is a bit complex."

More VMWare Avi Load Balancer cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Great product for the money. But they can get really expensive, so get what meets your needs."

"The solution is more expensive than one of its competitors."

"If your IT budget is good, go for it."

"Security should be involved in any base license. When you bring on F5, you only have default license. Then, the ASM product license has to be purchased. It would be great if F5 could include the ASM in the base license."

"Take a look at the modules that you are going to use. Look into the best bundles for them."

"The price should be reduced because it is expensive when compared to the competition."

"The price of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is too high."

"When we purchased additional licenses for our other locations, we received a discount of between 20% and 25%."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"I rate the solution price a four to five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high, since it is an affordable tool."

"With Avi Networks, you can buy a 10-Gig license and, if your primary data center goes down, in the flick of a switch you can move that license to your backup data center and it will generate the traffic... there are a lot of cost-effective measures."

"The licensing costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer are really variable. The product can be sold from a bandwidth utilization perspective. It can be sold from a per CPU perspective, depending on if you're looking at on-premises or hyperscale environments. Licensing costs vary quite a bit if you're familiar with the AWS Calculator, where you can see that it can widely vary per licensing model. On a scale of one to five, with one being not very good value for the money and five being great, I would rate the pricing for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer a five because its pricing is extremely competitive. Not all features are included with the license, for example, there's single licensing."

"The tool is expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Financial Services Firm

20%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	62
Midsize Enterprise	32
Large Enterprise	86

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	4

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP?

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) could improve file upload speeds when opening cases and attaching files; someti...

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What is your primary use case for F5 BIG-IP?

My main use case for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is placing our applications on F5 and the backend servers ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?

The product is costly. I would rate the price a five out of ten.

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Earn 20 points

What do you like most about Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?

The solution has simplified our network infrastructure management.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?

The tool is expensive. It is not cheap. The product must be cheaper.

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What needs improvement with Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?

When it comes to improvements for VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I think the documentation part needs a bit of work. The o...

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Comparisons

Fortinet FortiADC vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 18% of the time

NetScaler vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 7% of the time

HAProxy vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 6% of the time

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 6% of the time

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Competitors

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 14% of the time

HAProxy vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 13% of the time

NetScaler vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

Pulse Secure Virtual Traffic Manager vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

BotGuard vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

More Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall Competitors

NetScaler vs VMWare Avi Load Balancer

Compared 14% of the time

HAProxy vs VMWare Avi Load Balancer

Compared 14% of the time

NGINX Plus vs VMWare Avi Load Balancer

Compared 11% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs VMWare Avi Load Balancer

Compared 6% of the time

LoadBalancer Enterprise vs VMWare Avi Load Balancer

Compared 2% of the time

More VMWare Avi Load Balancer Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

April 2026

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report

Download F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall report

Download Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

VMWare Avi Load Balancer

March 2026

Download VMWare Avi Load Balancer product report

Also Known As

F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP

Pulse vWAF, Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager

Avi Software Load Balancer

Overview

F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.

BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall delivers scalable application security for off-the-shelf and custom applications, including third-party frameworks. Apply business rules to online traffic, inspect and block attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), and filter outgoing traffic and data to mask credit card data. Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall helps achieve compliance with PCI-DSS requirements.

Ivanti

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is an application delivery controller (ADC) platform. The solution provides scalable application delivery across any infrastructure and allows your organization to deliver multi-cloud application services, such as load balancing, autoscaling, application security, container networking, and web application firewall. It is designed with 100% software load balancing to ensure a fast and secure application experience. Additionally, Avi Networks Software Load Balancer offers elasticity and delivers intelligence across any environment.

The Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is unique because

It can scale from 0 to 1 million SSL transactions per second in minutes.
It can achieve 90% faster provisioning and 50% lower TCO than a traditional appliance-based approach.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Product Highlights

Troubleshoots application issues in less than a minute.
Alerts you of potential risks with SSL certificates and TLS versions used.
End-to-end timing for each transaction to help solve end-user experience issues.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Features

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Automated application delivery
Seamless integration with the CI/CD
Built-in analytics
End-to-end visibility
Actionable insights
Security
“Network DVR”-like capability to record and replay specific transactions
Google-like search filters transactions based on device, location, errors, etc.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Avi Networks Software Load Balancer. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Multi-cloud application services: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer provides consistent, enterprise-grade application services, including load balancing, WAF, and container networking across heterogeneous environments. The multi-cloud application services can be deployed on bare metal, VMs, or containers in any data center or public cloud environments.

Faster application provisioning: With this solution, you gain automation with 100% REST APIs and self-service like public cloud.

Better business decisions: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer uses analytics to deliver application insights and help you drive more intelligent decisions.

Containerized applications: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is a proven solution to deploy container-based workloads in production environments using Kubernetes/OpenShift/Tanzu clusters. It includes multi-cluster, multi-site support for containerized applications.

Lower TCO: The solution is 100% software, and does not require any proprietary hardware. In addition, because it offers on-demand autoscaling, there is no over-provisioning. Lastly, point-and-click application troubleshooting means there is no need for a black box.

Software-defined architecture: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is designed with a software-defined architecture with a centralized control plane (Avi Controller) and distributed data plane (Avi Service Engine). Because of this, elastic autoscaling is made easy.

Better end-user visibility: The solution gives you granular visibility into end-user experiences and server response in real time. It also empowers application owners with end-user stats to optimize and improve apps.

Application health score: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer summarizes analytics information into a helpful health score that provides a quick snapshot of the overall applications. The health score it provides is determined by server response time, resource usage, anomalous traffic, and security posture.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.

Gilt Groupe

Palo Alto Networks, DGDean, Swisslos

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

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