F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs NGINX Plus comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and NGINX Plus based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. NGINX Plus Report (Updated: March 2023).
687,947 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) improves the resilience and quality of the application itself, the speed and the user experience for the application. The data that the users need from the application is actually acquired faster. So, it provides faster data acquisition.""The load balancing function, the monitors that you can create, and iRules programmability are most valuable.""The capability is at a seven or eight out of ten.""Secure and scalable traffic management solution for applications. Good for bigger environments.""The feature I find the most valuable is the support infrastructure.""It has helped a lot to protect our organization from external attacks, especially XSS or XSRF types of attacks.""The tech support we got from F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager directly was pretty good.""The support from F5 BIG-IP LTM is good."

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"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps.""The load balancing module, which is equivalent to LTM, is the focus of the PSE. So far, the features of both are identical. I believe NGINX has more features for securing these services, but in terms of load balancing, both are massive solutions.""I find the solution’s community support and documentation most valuable. Compared to HAProxy, have found a lot of documentation and community support on Quora. If you would be asking me as a developer whether to choose this product, I would recommend this since it has good community support, documentation, and signature updates. The configuration of HAProxy is also very tedious. However, NGINX’s configuration is very simple.""NGINX Plus' most valuable feature is the ingress controller.""The most valuable features are the gateway and the ability to publish to sites.""This solution has everything.""Supports IMAP, POP and SMTP protocols for the reverse proxy.""The web proxy and the database proxy are excellent."

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Cons
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager could improve by having an FNI feature for a single source to multi-domain load balancing.""The solution could improve the documentation.""The user experience for dashboards and reports can be improved. They should make dashboards and the reporting system easier for users. They need to add more reports to the dashboard. Currently, for complicated reports, I have to do the customization. It should have more integration with network firewalls to be able to gather all the information required for traffic management.""BIG-IP LTM's sandboxing integration could be improved.""The pricing could always be better. It's a bit expensive.""Lacking in free training to help users understand the product more, so they would know how to correctly use it. Like other vendors and their products, becoming more proactive is an area for improvement.""The price for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very high. This aspect could be improved.""To improve the product, they could add more load balancing solutions in Kubernetes."

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"It would be great if there was even more automation to make it even easier to maintain.""The drawback is that you must obtain a license for everything.""NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5.""The center management system could be improved.""I would like to see the Grafana integration in NGINX which is already present in HAProxy. Grafana integration will help the solution visualize all the data analytics on the dashboard which is currently not present.""The KPI should be more focused on load balancing and the latency in application calling from the end system.""NGINX Plus is moderately priced, but it could give better value for money.""The scalability could be improved."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "You can buy it on a yearly basis, or you can go for a subscription. For on-premise boxes, it is just the RMA."
  • "Compared to using open-source products, the prices are not cheap."
  • "F5 is expensive."
  • "It is quite expensive as a product. Because it is very stable, it is also expensive."
  • "It is a little pricey. I wish the pricing was cheaper, but I wish the pricing was cheaper for everything."
  • "We are on an annual license to use the solution."
  • "This is a high-priced tool. We pay for its license yearly."
  • "The cost is high for this product, so it's not suitable for small customers, e.g. those with small environments."
  • More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "You pay for each feature that you want."
  • "The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
  • "It's an open source solution, so it's free."
  • "HAProxy is cheaper than NGINX."
  • More NGINX Plus Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The support from F5 BIG-IP LTM is good.
    Top Answer:There are a few licensing options available for F5 BIG-IP LTM. You can have a perpetual license which is a lifetime license. You then only need to renew the support, if you choose to open a ticket… more »
    Top Answer:The solution could improve the ease of use, the management could be simplified. Other solutions are easier to use.
    Top Answer:IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architecture can handle the most demanding tasks. From media streaming to web applications… more »
    Top Answer:I think installation only took a couple of minutes — no more than 10 minutes.
    Top Answer:Their license fee has gone up, so that is one concern that we have. We are looking for alternative solutions which compare well and fit into our budget. We are interested in an open-source version… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    22,788
    Comparisons
    18,505
    Reviews
    38
    Average Words per Review
    453
    Rating
    8.2
    Views
    17,216
    Comparisons
    13,799
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    390
    Rating
    8.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP
    NGINX
    Learn More
    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.

    NGINX Plus is the all‑in‑one application delivery platform for the modern application development.

    NGINX is the world’s most popular all‑in‑one application delivery platform for the modern application development. NGINX Plus adds enterprise-ready features for HTTP, TCP, and UDP load balancing, such as session persistencehealth checksadvanced monitoring, and management to give you the freedom to innovate without being constrained by infrastructure.

    NGINX Plus is a cloud‑native, reverse proxy, load balancer, and API gateway. NGINX Plus boasts scalable and reliable high availability along with monitoring to support debugging and diagnosing complex application architectures. Active health checks proactively poll upstream server status to get ahead of issues, and the integrated live activity monitoring dashboard provides a single‑pane view of your app environment. The NGINX Plus API enables integration with existing tools, optimizing resources and reducing tool sprawl.

    NGINX Plus extends NGINX Open Source with many additional features and support, providing customers with a complete application delivery solution.

    Offer
    Learn more about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    Learn more about NGINX Plus
    Sample Customers
    Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.
    Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider23%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Energy/Utilities Company25%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Media Company13%
    Government13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Comms Service Provider15%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise66%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business60%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise62%
    Buyer's Guide
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. NGINX Plus
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
    687,947 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is ranked 1st in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 43 reviews while NGINX Plus is ranked 4th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 8 reviews. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is rated 8.2, while NGINX Plus is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) writes "Great support, helpful documentation, and is user-friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NGINX Plus writes "Quick installation and very easy to manage while doing orchestration or automation". F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Citrix NetScaler, Fortinet FortiADC, HAProxy and A10 Networks Thunder ADC, whereas NGINX Plus is most compared with IIS, HAProxy, Kemp LoadMaster, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and Apache Web Server. See our F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. NGINX Plus report.

    See our list of best Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) vendors.

    We monitor all Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.