Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler comparison

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Fortinet FortiADC

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

NetScaler and Fortinet FortiADC both compete in the application delivery controllers (ADC) market. NetScaler seems to have the upper hand with its advanced features and integration capabilities, while FortiADC is notable for its cost-effectiveness.

Features: NetScaler offers flexible deployment models, the pay-as-you-grow Triscale architecture, and high compatibility with Citrix solutions. It provides robust security features, including a strong SSL VPN. FortiADC is recognized for its cost-effectiveness, straightforward load balancing, and integrated global DNS operations.

Room for Improvement: Users of NetScaler suggest enhancements in asymmetric web content optimization and scripting capabilities, reporting inconsistencies and bugs in updates. FortiADC users express a need for better support and documentation, a simpler setup process, and more robust security features similar to FortiWeb.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetScaler provides flexibility in deployment across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, with adequate yet variable technical support. FortiADC is primarily used in on-premises and private cloud setups. Its support is satisfactory, though there's a demand for more technically proficient support personnel.

Pricing and ROI: NetScaler is priced as a premium product with high licensing fees but is deemed favorable in ROI due to its features and reliability. FortiADC is competitively priced with straightforward licensing, appealing to smaller enterprises but offering fewer features.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiADC vs. NetScaler Report (Updated: July 2025).

Fortinet FortiADC vs. NetScaler

July 2025

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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:

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

6th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

NetScaler

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

107

Ranking in other categories

Network Management Applications (5th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiADC is 9.9%, up from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetScaler is 14.6%, down from 16.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

OusaidAbaz

Security Network Architect at Inmac

Integrates load balancing efficiently within existing technology environments

FortiADC provides load-balancing capabilities needed for integration with other Fortinet platforms. It allows for the creation of virtual IPs and applying various algorithms for traffic management. Although it offers fewer algorithms than competing platforms like F5, its capability to manage load balancing makes it valuable. The security features depend on the environment, relying on firewalls like FortiGate.

Read full review

DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU

Cloud Consultant at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking

Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

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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

"Fortinet FortiADC is a good product because each and every piece of content is monitored by it."

"The solution provides high-level services such as availability, redundancy, and load balancing between servers."

"The solution enhances performance by efficiently balancing the load across multiple backend servers."

"We can do patches offline without causing customers outages. The web application firewall features, especially those related to the OWASP Top Ten, provide automated protections. This allows more flexibility in patching the backend applications. Additionally, it offers visibility into the requests being made to the applications, and you can't protect what you can't see."

"Because ADC is the intermediary between the servers and the end-user application, it gives thorough information about the traffic, what the problem is."

"The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily."

"The GSLB, the DR side, is the best part. Because we had our main side in one city, we created another, and we had a complete MPLS over the internet. We used the GSLB and data loss for our business applications."

"It helps with defining server load balancing tasks and managing SSL certificates, ensuring the communication flow through the Fortinet gateway."

More Fortinet FortiADC pros

"The most valuable features are for the ADMs and the overall monitoring environment."

"My customers have told me that the performance of this solution is good."

"The most valuable feature is load balancing."

"One feature that works really well is the SSL VPN. It's very easy to set up and you can go very granular with it. You can define what user groups get what kind of access and the management overhead is very low."

"Very stable."

"My clients use it for load balancing."

"Citrix Netscaler makes it easy to provide services to end users, offering better visibility into user sessions compared to VMware. However, instability in network or machine can cause headaches as it's hard to pinpoint issues. SSL offload feature enhances security posture by providing secure connectivity between end users and backend systems. We use additional Azure remote security solutions for comprehensive protection."

"The solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"The L7 Persistent load-balancing algorithm has not worked for me after having tested it many times with my customer's in-house application. I'd like to suggest that the company make sure that all load-balancing algorithms work properly with most applications, even those that are in-house apps."

"Fortinet FortiADC should include an advanced-level SD-WAN."

"The solution's WAF needs an upgrade because it is not as good as FortiWeb, VMware, F5, or Imperva."

"The product’s price could be reduced. Also, some of its features need to be more advanced."

"Fortinet has some drawbacks, and it can be a bit challenging to scale."

"FortiADC is complex to configure so the interface should be improved."

"The solution needs to integrate sFlow. sFlow provides better visualization of the bandwidth and types of traffic passing through the device. When used in the traffic path, this information can be really useful."

"Technical support and documentation could both be improved."

More Fortinet FortiADC cons

"Maybe creating policies with simple regular expressions."

"They can improve the scalability and the multi-tenancy feature. We recently tried to configure an authentication, and we ran into some issues while using the web-based GUI. It was very slow when you log in with your credentials in the web-based GUI. Each time we clicked on the menu, it tried to do the authentication. It works properly in the console."

"The solution can improve their support and send tickets directly to a Citrix ADC engineer in order to avoid having to escalate each support call."

"Currently, it is not easy to use the configuration capabilities of the product."

"There are some features which are missing."

"Too many bugs in the software and it's always difficult when you need to update."

"We would like the licensing model for this product to be improved, as it isn't currently very transparent. There isn't a standard package available, and each extra feature creates an additional cost."

"The licensing model and technical support of the solution could be improved."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product has average pricing. I rate its pricing a five out of ten."

"The solution could be more cost-effective."

"The price is competitive"

"I believe the price is good. It's fair. There are no extra costs."

"Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better."

"The product has affordable pricing."

"The solution is less expensive than F5 or Imperva and is the most reasonably priced option available."

"Our basic license excludes features such as antivirus and IDS. Due to license limitations, some functionalities are not configured."

More Fortinet FortiADC pricing and cost advice

"The price for Citrix ADC here in Mexico was good, when you compare it with F5 and Radware."

"When compared to other solutions, the cost is high."

"The firewall license is included by default, with no additional costs."

"We are quite happy with price. It's not too high."

"I give the price of the solution a seven out of ten."

"This product is more expensive than some of the competitors."

"Ninety day free trial makes it easy to try out this solution."

"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten since it is expensive."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.

Do you recommend Fortinet FortiADC?

I recommend Fortinet FortiADC. My experience with Fortinet has been very positive. Our company has been using it for around five years. We mainly use FortiADC for the load balancing of application ...

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiADC?

The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily.

What do you like most about Citrix ADC?

The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic enters our environment.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADC?

After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more expensive.

What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexity. While it could be easier to manage, it is like transitioning from driving a ...

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

Comparisons

Compared 27% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 24% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 9% of the time

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 4% of the time

LoadBalancer Enterprise vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 4% of the time

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HAProxy vs NetScaler

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 10% of the time

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

Compared 8% of the time

NGINX Plus vs NetScaler

Compared 7% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Download Fortinet FortiADC product report

Fortinet FortiADC

April 2025

Download NetScaler product report

July 2025

Also Known As

FortiADC Application Delivery Controller, FortiADC

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall

Overview

Fortinet FortiADC is a robust application delivery controller (ADC) that delivers application optimization, application security, and application availability. FortiADC is a valued offering from Fortinet, which is widely recognized as a trusted supplier of dynamic security solutions worldwide. FortiADC offers dynamic security functions (AV, DDoS, and WAF) in addition to advanced application connectors for a simplified deployment and complete transparency to an organization's networks and applications. FortiADC offers three primary deployment options: physical machine, virtual machine, (VM) and cloud solution options.

Fortinet FortiADC Benefits

FortiADC security protocol: FortiADC integrates with FortiSandbox to improve the overall antivirus security protections where every file is scanned for known and unknown malicious risks. If a file is identified as malicious or problematic, it will be blocked in the future.
SSL protocol: FortiADC securely uses the most up-to-date cryptography to provide exceptional encryption and decryption using a hardware-based SSL ASIC. FortiADC offers complete transparency to inspect all traffic for threats, improves server response time, and reduces backend server load, SSL inspection and SSL offloading. FortiADC integrates seamlessly with Gemalto’s SafeNet Hardware Security Module (HSM).
FortiADC connectors: FortiADC Fabric Connectors offer open API-based integration and coordination with numerous software-defined networks (SDNs), third-party partners, and cloud management providers. Fortinet Fabric Connectors provide deep open and turnkey integration with recognized third-party vendors such as AWS, K8s, OCI, and SAP, in multi-vendor solutions, improving scalability, simplified management, and automation.
Business stability: FortiADC load balancing for on-premise global server load balancing (GSBL) and in the cloud (FortiGSBL Cloud) will ensure users can maintain a reliable and available network by improving the ability of scaling applications throughout numerous data centers to reduce application response times and enhance disaster recovery. Users are able to define protocols based on network latency concerns, overall data performance, and site availability.

Fortinet FortiADC Features

Application availability
- 4-7 application load balancing: DNS, HTTPS, RTMP, RADIUS, MySQL and more
- External fabric connectors: Splunk Integration, AWS/OCI Connector, Kubernetes Service.
- Security fabric connectors: FortiSIEM, Fortigate BanIP Integration, FortiAnalyzer, and more.
- Deployment modes: High availability (AA/AP Failover), Router mode, transparent mode (switch), one-arm mode (proxy with X-forwarded for support.
Web application firewall (WAF)
- Security services: Captcha support, cookie support, HTTP header security, XML/SOAP/JSON validation, CSRF protection, API gateway, and more.
- Application security: Web attack signature, bot detection, web vulnerability scanner, OWASP Top-10 Wizard, API protection and more.

Application enhancement
- HTTP and TCP improvement: TCP buffering, HTTP compressions/decompression, HTTP caching (dynamic and static objects), Bandwidth monitoring using quality of service (QoS), TCP buffering, and more.
- Authentication offloading: Two-factor authentication (Fortitoken/Fortitoken Cloud and Google Authentication), NTLM, AUTH2.0, SAML 2.0 (SP and Idp) RADIUS, LDAP, Kerbos, and local.
- Networking: Integration with Ansible, Cisco ACI, OpenStack and Nutanix, NVGRE and VXLAN support, VLAN and port trunking support, IPv6 Support (SLB, firewall, routing and interfaces), Dynamic NAT, Hide NAT, Static NAT for added scalability and flexibility.
- Management: Syslog support, SNMP using private MIBs with threshold-based traps. REST APIs, VDOMS, data analytics, real-time monitoring graphs, role-based monitoring, intuitive reporting, FortiView integration, and more.

Fortinet

One platform for a consistent application delivery and security experience because nobody has time to learn multiple systems to manage ADC deployments. NetScaler is built with a single code base using a software-based architecture, so no matter which ADC form factor you choose — hardware, virtual machine, bare metal, or container — the behavior will be the same.

Sample Customers

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk