HAProxy vs NGINX Plus vs NetScaler comparison

HAProxy and NetScaler are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. HAProxy is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.6, while NetScaler is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. HAProxy holds a 11.9% mindshare in ADC, compared to NetScaler’s 14.4% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of HAProxy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of NetScaler users who would recommend it.

HAProxy

Read 42 HAProxy reviews

7,217 Views
5,485 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

NetScaler

Read 107 NetScaler reviews

7,489 Views
6,066 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

NGINX Plus

Read 31 NGINX Plus reviews

4,361 Views
2,747 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

HAProxy

NetScaler

NGINX Plus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HAProxy, NetScaler, and NGINX Plus based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetScaler, F5, Microsoft and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

August 2025

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Helped 865,649 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of HAProxy is 11.9%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetScaler is 14.4%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 7.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Kaushlendra Singh

Manager - IT Infrastructure and Network at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Used for load balancing, but its dashboard and reporting could be improved

We use the solution for load balancing The solution's implementation and troubleshooting are not easy. The solution's dashboards and reports could be improved. I have been using HAProxy for 12 years. We didn’t face any issues with the solution’s stability. I rate the solution’s stability an…

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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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Michael Olayemi

Senior Software Engineer at Checkit

Enables public access and secure configurations through reverse proxy

The primary valuable feature of NGINX for me is its ability to provide a reverse proxy. I have found that this feature supports our local server, and I am able to connect through our DNS system, making it accessible publicly. Additionally, the integration with SSL certificates and the configuration capabilities make it a valuable solution for my use case. Without NGINX, users would not be able to access our application, which means there is positive ROI from using NGINX as it is crucial for the functioning of my organization.

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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

"We did not need technical support because the documentation is good."

"We use the solution for load balancing."

"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."

"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."

"It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements."

"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."

"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."

"Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind."

More HAProxy pros

"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."

"I like app flows and custom flows. They integrate with multiple flows."

"Citrix is good for application protection."

"I would say the rewriting and redirection functions are must-have's for us."

"It has helped us to increase the resiliency of the application and the performance."

"It allows students to access required software for their studies."

"The best feature of Citrix is its track record of stability in its features."

"From a security standpoint, It is a comprehensive solution in a single box."

More NetScaler pros

"It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX."

"Zero Downtime has always been a strength in recommending infrastructure web services. NGINX allows me to execute such infrastructure with less complications and the ability to switch from server to server easily."

"The best solution, by far, for web traffic control for things in production and just around the house."

"The most valuable features are the gateway and the ability to publish to sites."

"Nginx is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles."

"The product is resilient."

"-"

"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."

More NGINX Plus pros

Cons

"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."

"There are three main areas to improve: 1) Make remote management more modern by adding API. 2) Propose a general HA solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this). 3) Thread option should be a bit more stable."

"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."

"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."

"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."

"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."

"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."

"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."

More HAProxy cons

"The solution should be able to scale more effectively than it does."

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

"I will try to migrate all the tools to the cloud because there is more lab and more VPN scalability available in the cloud. It is not available on-premises."

"The product provides some templates to integrate with applications like MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, SAP Enterprise Portal, and others. However, the last update for these templates was 2013 (lots of applications are running on versions newer then 2013)."

"Citrix NetScaler has been recently acquired by another company and the support has been negatively impacted, the solution is at its end of life. The support for the solution could improve. The sales team needs to be improved."

"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."

"Its GUI should be improved. Its CLI is powerful, but GUI needs more features."

"The product could be improved by making it easier to use and easier to implement."

More NetScaler cons

"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."

"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."

"Initially, I experienced hiccups whenever I installed the application."

"The center management system could be improved."

"The KPI should be more focused on load balancing and the latency in application calling from the end system."

"Our most challenging part was to run an older PHP website reverse-proxied through NGINX. That was not fun."

"One area of improvement could be that NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates."

"Make modules easier to enable or disable. The beauty and ugly side of the NGINX modules is you have to know how to compile the module. For beginners or non-very technical aspirant(s) going for NGINX, they have to learn how to compile the modules."

More NGINX Plus cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy."

"HAProxy is free software. There are optional paid products (support/appliances)."

"If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution."

"When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free."

"It is free of cost."

"The licensing fee for the solution is $690 per unit annually."

"HAProxy is a free open-source solution."

"The product is open source."

More HAProxy pricing and cost advice

"Citrix ADM costs us approximately $5000 per month."

"I do not have any experience with the pricing of the product."

"You get the value for your money. There aren't any hidden fees."

"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

"It's not for startups or SOHO."

"F5 BIG-IP is much more expensive than Citrix ADC. For example, If we choose two platforms, Citrix ADC, 3000 version, and we choose F5, F4200 version. F5 BIG-IP has connections, timers, and throughput similar to Citrix ADC, but the price is very expensive."

"The license for Citrix NetScaler is on an annual basis and it is reasonably priced."

"The pricing could be lower."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

"NGINX Plus is worth it, if you need it. If you do not need the features or support, the free and open source package is more than capable. "

"The cost is reasonable."

"NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it."

"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours."

"NGINX Plus is an open-source solution with limited additional features. When you try to get additional features in the solution, then you need to pay an extra amount to NGINX Plus."

"Compared to other similar solutions on the market, I think it's over-priced."

"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."

"There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free."

More NGINX Plus pricing and cost advice

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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

18%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

16%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Do you recommend HAProxy?

I do recommend HAProxy for more simple applications or for companies with a low budget, since HAProxy is a free, open...

See all answers

What do you like most about HAProxy?

The solution is effective in managing our traffic.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HAProxy?

HAProxy is an open-source solution.

See all answers

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 ente...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexi...

See all answers

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 architectur...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX Plus?

It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?

My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs HAProxy

Compared 13% of the time

Istio vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

Envoy vs HAProxy

Compared 11% of the time

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

Compared 10% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs HAProxy

Compared 6% of the time

More HAProxy Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 9% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler

Compared 8% of the time

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

Compared 8% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

Radware Alteon vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

More NetScaler Competitors

IIS vs NGINX Plus

Compared 15% of the time

Apache Web Server vs NGINX Plus

Compared 12% of the time

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

Compared 10% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs NGINX Plus

Compared 9% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NGINX Plus

Compared 6% of the time

More NGINX Plus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HAProxy

August 2025

Download HAProxy product report

Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

August 2025

Download NetScaler product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX Plus

August 2025

Download NGINX Plus product report

Also Known As

HAProxy Community Edition, HAProxy Enterprise Edition, HAPEE

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

NGINX

Overview

HAProxy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the fastest and most popular and trusted software load balancer products in the marketplace today. Organizations are able to immediately deploy HAProxy solutions to enable websites and applications to optimize performance, security, and observability. HAProxy solutions are available to scale to any environment.

HAProxy is an open-source product and has a robust, active, reliable community. The solutions are continually tested and improved on by the community. HAProxy offers a dynamic design to support the most modern architectures, microservices, and deployment environments (appliances, containers, virtual, and cloud).

HAProxy utilizes a cloud-native protocol, which makes it a complete solution for cloud services such as Red Hat OpenShift, OVH, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more. It also can be used as the reference load balancer in OpenStack.

HAProxy Products

HAProxy One: This is a next-gen end-to-end application delivery platform created to secure and streamline modern application architectures. It offers a complete suite of solutions, such as application delivery software, turnkey, and appliance services observed and administered through a central control plane. The product supplies application acceleration, CDN, DDoS, bot management, WAF capabilities, and load balancing.

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane: This product enables organizations to streamline workflows, arrange traffic routing and security protocols, enhance the speed of delivery, and scale out of the organization’s applications. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane offers an intuitive user interface to observe and control the complete product lineup and API for administering numerous fleets of HAProxy Enterprise servers, either in the cloud or on premises.

HAProxy Edge: This product offering is an application delivery network (ADN) that provides a broad array of turnkey application services with amazing scale and complete visibility. Services include application and content acceleration, advanced security, and load balancing.

HAProxy ALOHA Hardware or Virtual Load Balancer: This product is a virtual load balancer or plug-and-play hardware constructed upon HAProxy Enterprise that is designed to support proxying at Layer 4 and Layer 7. It has a user-friendly GUI, simple deployment, and no limit on backend servers, making it a complete product for organizations desiring a reliable system to provide high-end load distribution for critical services.

HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller: This product is designed to facilitate smooth traffic flow into a Kubernetes cluster. It is able to automatically discover anomalies and changes in an organization's Kubernetes infrastructure and provide precise distribution of traffic to healthy pods, with no downtime caused by poor pod health or scaling changes. The product comes with an embedded WAF to optimize the security of an organization’s applications running in Kubernetes.

HAProxy Enterprise: This product is the enterprise-class edition of HAProxy offering a dynamic and sturdy code base with next-generation features, an enterprise suite of add-ons, professional services, and trusted support.
- Cluster-wide tracking and rate limiting
- Advanced DDoS and bot management
- Web application firewall
- Reliable expert support
- High performance modules
- Device detection and geolocation
- Real-time dashboard

Reviews from Real Users

“Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind.” - Nathanel S., Platform Architect at SES

“I use HAProxy for individuals who can not buy low balancers. I built NFV in a box and send individuals a pathway into an HAProxy VM. The setup was not difficult; it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC. When it comes to pricing, HAProxy is free.” - Nasir O., Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.

HAProxy

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.

NetScaler

NGINX Plus is a versatile solution that offers load balancing, caching, proxying, and API deployment capabilities. It can be deployed on private or public clouds and is ideal for building CDN solutions. The solution can also be used to secure web applications and replace web services like Apache.

NGINX has helped organizations improve functioning, reduce downtimes, and offer a DevOps-friendly solution. Its community support and documentation are highly regarded, and its configuration is more straightforward, making it a recommended choice over HAProxy.

Sample Customers

Booking.com, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp

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

Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

August 2025

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