Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall vs NetScaler comparison

Ivanti and NetScaler are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. Ivanti is ranked #16, while NetScaler is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Additionally, 100% of Ivanti users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of NetScaler users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

NetScaler and Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall are solutions for web application security. Ivanti seems to have the upper hand due to its innovative security features.

Features: NetScaler offers content switching, load balancing, and DDoS protection to enhance performance. Ivanti provides comprehensive threat protection, automatic updates, and robust configurations, focusing on advanced security.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Ivanti offers streamlined deployment and excellent customer support for smooth integration. NetScaler, while powerful, requires careful setup, which can be complex.

Pricing and ROI: NetScaler has higher initial setup costs but delivers solid ROI in expansive environments. Ivanti offers cost-effective pricing with a focus on ROI through security, appealing to businesses prioritizing security without high budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

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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

Cloudflare Web Application ...

Q&A Highlights

it_user712188

Works at a tech company

Jun 30, 2018

Pulse vADC/vTM vs. Netscaler

Zeus was a great company - Its a shame Riverbed screwed up the acquisition and destroyed it. The product has been in a state of limbo for several years, I wouldn't trust Pulse to make anything out of it. Go with F5 or Citrix if you have the money. If money is an issue then go with Kemp or Loadbalancer.org which are #1 and #2 at the value end of the market. Radware is pretty cool as well - but not cheap. https://www.loadbalancer.org/blog/so-just-how-should-you-compare-load-balancers/

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Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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reviewer890211

Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Good feature set and is simple to deploy

In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered. We've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else. We sort of stopped deploying them because of that. There are additional costs to the standard licensing. There are bandwidth prices. The feature set is quite good. We've been told to stop using them because of the price. If they can do something to address that I believe it would be better. On the latest version they've got a community edition, which is quite a good bandwidth, but in essence, it's to address the entry-level price. When you get to 10 gig bandwidth, it's way too expensive.

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Letarik Terefe

Information Technology Division Director at Ethiopian Roads Administration

Offers better visibility into user sessions compared to other solutions

Improvements are needed to address the issue of machines becoming unregistered, ensuring stability for end users. Troubleshooting with Citrix support can be challenging, so clearer diagnostics would be beneficial. As for global server load balancing, it works well on-premises, depending on user volume and service stability. Overall, it's satisfactory for us.

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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

"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."

"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."

"The impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."

"There is a huge signature repository"

"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."

"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is simple to deploy. The deployment took us ten minutes."

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

"An 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."

"The MAS integration for HDX Insight has provided teams with significant visibility into network performance of the user's connection."

"The advantage of Citrix Web App and API Protection is just its graphic user interface for beginners. The solution is nothing special, but we have to use it for the corporation. Another advantage of Citrix Web App and API Protection is that we have our copy to test things and get the know-how of it."

"The maintenance of the solution is not complex."

"Helped us a lot with load balancing."

"Citrix NetScaler offers robust security features, including SmartAccess and customizable policies, making it a reliable choice for safeguarding user data."

"It is a stable solution. It crashed only once, four years ago...There is a return on investment using the solution."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"Support can be challenging at times."

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

"The reporting could be more granular."

"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered. We've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else."

"The setup for Citrix NetScaler has room for improvement. It could be easier."

"Citrix ADC can be really complex. It isn't very simple like some other appliances that I've worked with. You need a lot of skill and experience to manage it. I'm not talking about a year or two. You need at least four years to understand it very well. It is not that easy to learn. They should make it a lot simpler for users to understand the management of it. They can also provide some additional training. The material they have on the site is not sufficient enough for you to understand how to manage it. Their training is expensive, and not everyone has the funds and experience for it. Citrix isn't very popular around these parts of the world. So, it can use some more marketing, sales, enlightenment, and advertisement. These could bring more market for them. Basically, there are just a few companies that really go for Citrix. Most of the companies go for VMware because they marketed themselves more than Citrix. There isn't much difference between Citrix and VMware. VMware is a little more robust than Citrix. Citrix has focused more on desktops rather than server virtualization, and that's the advantage VMware has over Citrix. Citrix also needs to educate and inform users about the infrastructure that is supported with a version. Currently, if the customers don't look at the datasheet, they might miss this important information."

"An area for improvement in Citrix Web App and API Protection is for it to give real-time notifications and alerts. It would be practical if the solution warns you if there's an attack or if the load or traffic volume increases or decreases. An additional feature I'd like to see in Citrix Web App and API Protection is a prediction or artificial intelligence on what is happening, for example, attacks."

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

"I would like to see support for scripting, like "iRule", which gives you the option to implement any configuration which is not available out of the box."

"An area for improvement would be the difficulty in finding information about standard licensing costs over the internet. They should provide some reference prices on the net to be quickly referred to."

"Citrix ADM needs to improve on its additional features and reduce the communication ports."

"Development team's response time could be better."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"It is not too pricey."

"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"The client pays for the Citrix NetScaler license annually."

"It's not for startups or SOHO."

"The solution's pricing is very high compared to its competitors."

"Citrix NetScaler VPX is not the cheapest solution out there, but you get what you pay for."

"There isn't much of a difference between the cost of Citrix and that of other similar solutions."

"Our licensing fees including technical support are approximately $3,500 USD."

"Citrix Web App and API Protection are in the middle when we talk about pricing and licensing"

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

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

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Answers from the Community

it_user712188

Works at a tech company

Jun 30, 2018

Pulse vADC/vTM vs. Netscaler

2 out of 5 answers

Maksim Sataev

network specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 19, 2018

As far as I know, Netscaler has special hardware solution SDX where you can run virtual appliance (VPX) so much as you need and license determines the total system performance. It's not a problem for scaling virtual appliance by each application. You can ask Citrix managers for details. I hope it will be helpful.

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GregBristow

unemployed

Jun 19, 2018

My thought would be Barracuda Cloud WAF. This will work in 15 min. With lb and default templates. Go to demo.Barracuda.com Select WAF for hardware or select cloud. Additional info ask if needed

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	45
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	57

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

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What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

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What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

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Earn 20 points

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...

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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...

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What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

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

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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

Compared 7% of the time

HAProxy vs NetScaler

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A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs NetScaler

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Product Reports

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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

March 2026

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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

Pulse vWAF, Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall, NetScaler VPX - Customer Licensed

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall delivers scalable application security for off-the-shelf and custom applications, including third-party frameworks. Apply business rules to online traffic, inspect and block attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), and filter outgoing traffic and data to mask credit card data. Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall helps achieve compliance with PCI-DSS requirements.

Ivanti

NetScaler is an advanced application delivery controller providing load balancing, SSL offloading, and enhanced network performance. Users benefit from its robust security features, seamless Citrix integrations, and cost-effective infrastructure.

Designed to optimize and secure application delivery, NetScaler offers high availability and supports data centers with its load balancing and reverse proxy capabilities. It ensures effective traffic management and provides valuable insights into network health while integrating easily with Citrix products. Users appreciate its centralized management via ADM and flexible deployment options tailored to their infrastructure needs. However, there is room for improvement in its management tools, interface, and documentation, alongside a need for security enhancements and better licensing flexibility.

What are the most important features of NetScaler?

Flexible Deployment: Allows adaptation to different environments and needs.
Load Balancing: Efficiently distributes traffic to enhance performance.
SSL Offloading: Offloads encryption to optimize server performance.
Content Switching: Enables tailored content delivery based on user needs.
Robust Security: Includes firewalling and AAA authentication.
Global Server Load Balancing: Distributes load across multiple locations for high availability.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Cost-effectiveness: Delivers an efficient infrastructure without high costs.
Reliable Performance: Ensures consistent delivery and resilience.
High Availability: Maintains network uptime and service quality.
Technical Support: Offers responsive assistance for operational issues.

NetScaler is implemented across sectors like healthcare, finance, and education to guarantee secure remote access, enhance application network management, and support virtual desktops. Its application gateways and VPN access capabilities make it ideal for industries needing secure and efficient connectivity solutions.

NetScaler

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Gilt Groupe

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

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

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