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F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition vs VMWare Avi Load Balancer 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
5.6
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition delivers ROI through cost savings, enhanced performance, security, and operational efficiency with integrated modules.
Sentiment score
5.0
VMWare Avi Load Balancer users see cost savings and improved efficiency, though some haven’t seen immediate financial returns.
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
VMWare Avi Load Balancer has created a smoother failover process without issues, keeping the state normal, where typically there would be manual intervention.
Senior Database Engineer, SRE at Interswitch Group
We can easily identify from the dashboard whether there is any faulty server and monitor the health checks.
V Mware And Vector Administration at Tech Mahindra Limited
I have not found any return on investment so far, as it does not really lend itself to that; it is more about not having to stand up another data center for redundancy.
Vdi Consultant at Garbutt Ltd
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition customer service is praised for professionalism and speed, but concerns exist over response times and costs.
Sentiment score
6.5
VMware Avi Load Balancer's support is generally positive, with skilled engineers but occasional delays in response times.
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
Once we raise the support case through the portal, they immediately assist us, join a call, and they are fixing the issues and providing solutions for any critical application failure issues.
V Mware And Vector Administration at Tech Mahindra Limited
The solution architect from VMware side told me that there would be no issue adding them. Here we are with an RFP, and we cannot add them easily.
Pre Sales at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
The support for VMWare Avi Load Balancer is really good, and the integration with other tools is really effective, which makes the overall experience smoother.
Senior Database Engineer, SRE at Interswitch Group
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.2
F5 BIG-IP VE efficiently scales in cloud and on-premise, though high-load issues occur, yet remains flexible and reliable.
Sentiment score
7.0
VMWare Avi Load Balancer is highly scalable, efficiently managing traffic but needs GSLB for better scalability and user satisfaction.
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
I would rate the scalability of VMWare Avi Load Balancer a perfect ten out of ten because it senses traffic and scales automatically, also scaling down when there is no need, making it very elastic, resulting in zero costs when there is no traffic, which is excellent.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
VMware Avi Load Balancer is software defined, and due to that, scaling is very much easier compared with other products and traditional hardware appliances.
V Mware And Vector Administration at Tech Mahindra Limited
In my role as a database engineer, scalability works in two layers and rarely becomes a bottleneck.
Senior Database Engineer, SRE at Interswitch Group
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable and reliable, with benefits like enhanced performance and uptime, despite occasional high-load issues.
Sentiment score
8.1
VMWare Avi Load Balancer offers reliable performance, stability, and centralized management, ideal for small to medium businesses.
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
VMWare Avi Load Balancer is very reliable and stable.
Vdi Consultant at Garbutt Ltd
VMWare Avi Load Balancer is stable based on my experience.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
I would like to provide a rating of nine out of ten for this product for stability and scalability.
V Mware And Vector Administration at Tech Mahindra Limited
 

Room For Improvement

F5 BIG-IP VE requires improvements in security, features, integration, and support with better pricing, training, and simplified licensing.
VMWare Avi Load Balancer requires better pricing, documentation, integration, setup ease, and enhanced functionalities for smaller IT teams.
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
Predictive analytics for capacity planning and additional built-in operational reports on the dashboard would help infrastructure teams during daily monitoring.
V Mware And Vector Administration at Tech Mahindra Limited
Multi-cloud capability comes from a configuration called NSX Extended.
Pre Sales at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
The need for policy execution tracing to simplify debugging is evident because if connections are routed incorrectly, for example, directly to a replica, debugging can become painful in production.
Senior Database Engineer, SRE at Interswitch Group
 

Setup Cost

F5 BIG-IP VE offers valuable scalability and security despite high licensing costs, comparing favorably to alternatives like FortiWeb.
VMWare Avi Load Balancer offers flexible, subscription-based pricing but may be seen as costlier than some 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
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that its pricing is quite pricier compared to Anthos Service Mesh.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
it operates on a capacity and consumption model, unlike traditional appliances that charge based on hardware.
Senior Database Engineer, SRE at Interswitch Group
 

Valuable Features

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers scalable load balancing, SSL offloading, and security features, enhancing performance, uptime, and cost-efficiency.
The platform offers seamless integration, stability, scalability, and advanced analytics with centralized management and multi-cloud support enhancing performance.
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
Since implementing VMWare Avi Load Balancer, we no longer need to manually change IP addresses in our configuration, as Avi automates this process, which controls traffic and network appropriately, adding a layer of security and assurance.
Senior Database Engineer, SRE at Interswitch Group
The special capability I appreciate about VMWare Avi Load Balancer is its ease of use; it is very lightweight and quite inexpensive to deploy.
Vdi Consultant at Garbutt Ltd
It enables flexible deployment across environments and elastic auto-scaling, automatically scaling load balancer capacity based on traffic, then adding and removing service engines dynamically without over-provisioning, which leads to lower infrastructure costs and efficient handling of sudden traffic spikes.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
 

Categories and Ranking

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMWare Avi Load Balancer
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is 1.8%. The mindshare of VMWare Avi Load Balancer is 4.4%, down from 5.7% 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 Edition1.8%
VMWare Avi Load Balancer4.4%
Other93.8%
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.
Sasikiran Sakalabattina - PeerSpot reviewer
V Mware And Vector Administration at Tech Mahindra Limited
Centralized load management has improved availability and reduces manual effort for critical apps
The features we use most frequently in VMware Avi Load Balancer are virtual services, backend pools, health monitoring, and Layer 7 load balancing. Virtual services are a component of VMware Avi Load Balancer that serves as the primary entry point for the client traffic. In our application, I regularly create and manage the virtual services for the web applications, APIs, and internal business applications. We configure SSL certificates for load balancing the policies and health monitoring at the virtual service. The best feature of VMware Avi Load Balancer is health monitoring. The most valuable feature for me is the health monitoring capability. In our production environment with more than one thousand virtual machines, it continuously checks the health of the backend application servers. During monthly Windows patching or unexpected application failures, unhealthy pool members are automatically removed from the service. This feature is significantly reducing the traffic directed to unhealthy services without any manual intervention. Once the application server is restored, VMware Avi Load Balancer automatically adds the server back to the pool. This feature has significantly improved the application availability and is reducing the business downtime. Due to this, manual interventions required are minimal, so it is saving time.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Government
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
Sometimes customers assume vulnerability points in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition represent actual vulnerabilities, but they are false positives in that particular environment. In customer scans where m...
What advice do you have for others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
I am currently working on different types of projects. I am handling SSL Orchestrator in a bank project and mainly handling load balancing in telecom projects. The value of my experience depends on...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I think it is expensive.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, senior administrators manage this aspect, and I am not fully aware of it. However, I can say that compared to other products, the pricing for VMWare Av...
What needs improvement with Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?
VMware Avi Load Balancer is actually a mature and reliable product, but there are areas where it could improve, such as improving the cloud environments. I would like to see more automated root-cau...
What advice do you have for others considering Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?
I would like to give the rating of nine out of ten for VMware Avi Load Balancer because it is an excellent product with centralized management where we can manage every virtual machine in one conso...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Avi Software Load Balancer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Palo Alto Networks, DGDean, Swisslos
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition vs. VMWare Avi Load Balancer and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.