F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Kemp LoadMaster are competitors in the application delivery controller market. F5 BIG-IP LTM generally has the upper hand due to its extensive feature set, despite higher costs, whereas Kemp LoadMaster stands out for affordability and simplicity.
Features: F5 BIG-IP LTM offers advanced load balancing, comprehensive application security, and customizable traffic management through iRules. Its reverse proxy architecture supports diverse environments, and it integrates with development environments like Eclipse and .NET. Kemp LoadMaster focuses on cost-effective solutions with templates for popular applications such as Exchange and SharePoint. It provides ease of deployment and features like SSL offloading, although it lacks the depth of customization available in F5.
Room for Improvement: F5 BIG-IP LTM is associated with high costs and complexity, requiring refined licensing processes for lower-end deployments. Enhancements in firmware quality and configuration simplicity are recommended. Kemp LoadMaster is competitively priced, yet its user interface and logging capabilities could be improved. Users seek better WAF capabilities and more customization options.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both F5 BIG-IP LTM and Kemp LoadMaster support on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments. F5’s deployment is complex but backed by expert customer service. Kemp LoadMaster is easier to deploy and well-supported, suitable for less specialized IT environments.
Pricing and ROI: F5 BIG-IP LTM is considered a premium product with high initial costs, offering a strong ROI in large-scale implementations. Kemp LoadMaster is more budget-friendly and provides quicker ROI with flexible licensing for straightforward use cases.
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.
Kemp LoadMaster is a powerful load balancing solution that also serves as a web application firewall. Its primary use case is load balancing and application load balancing, making it an ideal solution for organizations that must distribute traffic across multiple servers. Kemp's integration with an active directory for ESP usage, hosting/deployment of SSL certificates, and pricing are some of its most valuable features.
Using Kemp has helped organizations mitigate cross-scripting vulnerabilities, cookie-related issues, and content security policy issues. It has also allowed them to handle everything with Kemp instead of working on each application individually.
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