No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition vs NGINX Plus 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.7
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition enhances performance and reduces costs by improving application uptime, security, and operational efficiency.
Sentiment score
7.5
NGINX Plus boosts website speed and reduces costs, offering superior flexibility and scalability, ensuring significant returns for organizations.
Overall, I can say the ROI includes a twenty-five to thirty percent cost reduction, with some areas achieving forty percent cost reduction in our expenses.
Network Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is a significant performance improvement in the website and website speed.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
With F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have not faced any RMAs, which has made a positive operational impact.
Senior Network And Security Engineer at Mobily
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.5
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition support is effective and knowledgeable, though off-hour delays and access issues occasionally occur.
Sentiment score
6.9
NGINX Plus offers robust support with responsive engineers, though some lower-tier licenses experience delayed responses; documentation often suffices.
I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as a perfect ten based on all of the experience I have had so far.
Senior Network And Security Engineer at Mobily
I rate customer support a 10 out of 10, as they are knowledgeable and provide straightforward troubleshooting.
Network Engineer at Thryv
Customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is excellent.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
Response time is good because they have assigned and dedicated support engineers to us, and we have weekly cadence calls.
Senior Information Security Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers scalable, flexible resource expansion, supporting high availability and adaptability for increased traffic and demand.
Sentiment score
7.7
NGINX Plus is highly scalable and flexible, easily adapting to various enterprise needs and supporting multiple users and websites.
It is the most scalable and reliable system.
Cybersecurity Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Within ten minutes of time, we can scale and boot as many virtual machines as needed in the environment.
Network Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Being a virtual edition, we were able to scale resources such as CPU, memory, and throughput based on our demand without major architectural changes.
Network Security Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
While some people use NGINX for web servers, my current use case focuses on networking and tunneling, which does not necessitate much scaling.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is highly stable, offering strong performance and security, with minimal downtime apart from updates.
Sentiment score
7.8
NGINX Plus is highly stable and reliable, praised for connectivity and performance, despite some scalability challenges in clustering.
The load balancing module still performed admirably.
Sr network engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
The performance increased significantly and the response times of the application improved.
Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The uptime improvements with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are almost close to 100%, as it only goes down if a failover happens.
Sr. Consutant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
I require ninety-nine point nine percent uptime, and NGINX has been pivotal in helping me achieve this along with our other DNS services.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
 

Room For Improvement

F5 BIG-IP VE requires interface upgrades, better microservices support, improved logging, clearer licensing, easier upgrades, and enhanced Azure integration.
NGINX Plus users seek improved scalability, user-friendly interface, better integration, cost-effectiveness, advanced features, and enhanced support services.
The primary concern I noted regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is its scalability during high-load situations.
Sr network engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
It is a somewhat expensive solution, and the price needs to be improved based on what our customers have told us.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
With FortiWeb, we have a dashboard where I can check the policy status with just one click, and everything is easily accessible.
Senior Network And Security Engineer at Mobily
NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
As with any application, there were initial issues, however, after receiving support, everything was rectified.
Executive Director at Geojit
There were some vulnerabilities in F5.
Senior Information Security Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users appreciate F5 BIG-IP VE's ROI and scalability, but licensing costs and pricing transparency remain concerns.
NGINX Plus has a modular licensing model with varying costs, offering value but can be expensive compared to alternatives.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's pricing structure was significantly more advantageous and aligned with our budgetary considerations.
Sr network engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
My experience with pricing and setup costs for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition was mixed, as they do not have an option for 10 gig licensing, which was costly for us.
Analyst at Accenture
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition solves a very significant problem of high availability and performance.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
The solution offers a cost advantage.
Executive Director at Geojit
 

Valuable Features

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition boosts user experience and efficiency with load balancing, security features, high availability, and cost reduction.
NGINX Plus excels in load balancing, security, and integration, praised for simplicity, efficiency, and superior traffic management features.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helped our customers increase the high availability and performance of their applications, specifically their web applications.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
If ten thousand, fifty thousand, or even a million people want to access the application simultaneously, we have configured auto-scalability.
Network Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has impacted my organization positively with cost savings by saving public IP addresses, and its performance and stability, which give almost 100% uptime for the application because we have high availability.
Sr. Consutant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
For API management, the WebSocket, and the WebServer, NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support.
Executive Director at Geojit
The web application firewall feature has helped enhance security for our applications because most of the attacks which are performed on our website are being blocked by it.
Senior Information Security Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
9th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is 1.3%. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 7.3%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition1.3%
NGINX Plus7.3%
Other91.4%
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2800392 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cloud deployment has simplified traffic distribution and now supports flexible multi-zone DR
Regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's improvement areas, the current dashboard is very useful, but I believe the registration process should be simplified in the virtual edition. Especially in the Azure environment, many features are not currently aligned and working with Azure. We need to make efforts to ensure it is well integrated with Azure. Currently, if we want to integrate route tables with the virtual F5 edition, we need to deploy scripting inside the virtual F5 instances, and then that script performs the virtual IP route table changes in the Azure environment. This feature should be auto-configured, and efforts are needed to ensure the virtual edition is very much aligned with the Azure environment. I am expecting this improvement in the next edition. The failover capability is also not as good as it should be. We have tested the failover functionality, and sometimes we have observed that failover fails. F5 does not successfully fail over to other instances perfectly, so that also needs to be improved. Security should also be enhanced, as in the past I have seen some security loopholes. Tightening of security should be included in the new software. These improvements should be present in near future editions.
Nadeem-Inamdar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Information Security Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Advanced policies and web firewall have strengthened application protection and reduced attack traffic
There were some vulnerabilities in F5. They tried to fix it, but the fixes were not available at the time because they were zero days, so they attempted to fix it, but their support was not proper. Their support should be improved because sometimes features which we need for customization take time, and they are sometimes feasible and sometimes not feasible by the team, so their support and the engineering team should improve their product. I would like to see more features regarding customization which should be built into the application, and the tool optimization should be good, and the dashboard should be more crisp and clear.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
Improvements for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition could include a more straightforward process for major updates where we could pre-schedule upgrades to avoid downtime.
What advice do you have for others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition did not impact anything positively, as during core network activities, backend servers stopped responding due to being legacy servers, which may create issues. F5 BIG-IP V...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
Regarding pricing, I believe it is high, but the setup cost is low and licensing is fine, though I do not have the complete analysis from our sales team. I understand that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition...
Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?
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,...
What do you like most about NGINX Plus?
It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.
 

Also Known As

No data available
NGINX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.