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Kemp LoadMaster vs NGINX Plus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Kemp LoadMaster
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
8th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Kemp LoadMaster is 7.5%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 7.9%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

PeterForster - PeerSpot reviewer
A highly stable and scalable load-balancing software that offers great technical support
My company is really happy with Kemp LoadMaster as a product. My company is also happy with the support we receive from Kemp LoadMaster. I want Kemp LoadMaster to provide users with better reporting capabilities in relation to TCP packets. In general, the connections that are present in the system require improvement. Feature-wise, Kemp LoadMaster has everything that our company's customers require. Kemp LoadMaster also has features that have supported our company's past projects.
Ritesh-Bakhru - PeerSpot reviewer
Quick installation and very easy to manage while doing orchestration or automation
NGINX cannot be a replacement for your traditional load balancer with what we use in the network today. However, with applications going toward microservices, NGINX is definitely a way forward. F5 has many traditional load balancing features, so they still need to bring some of those features to NGINX. NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5. I think F5 is trying to implement those features in NGINX so they can improve the balancing on NGINX, but I think that will take some time. With the traditional F5 set up, the same OS can do load balancing, firewalls, and even policy enforcement. If we are able to bring some of those capabilities to NGINX, I think it would become a versatile solution and usage would definitely increase.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface, and you can set up a new VIP in a couple of minutes."
"The most valuable feature so far has been the high-availability options that allowed us to add an additional Kemp LoadMaster VLM virtual appliance into our VMware vSphere environment, to provide failover for our existing LoadMaster."
"When you configure the listening services, you can implement a lot of security features like the Edge Security Pack that intercepts the requests and processes those before they are sent to the real servers."
"​Simple to install with good documentation."
"We really like the performance of this solution."
"The pricing of the solution is valuable."
"Failover is seamless and our services are rock solid."
"It has been functional. We don't have any outages."
"Its versatility and capabilities make it invaluable for implementing patches and fixes when necessary."
"The primary valuable feature of NGINX for me is its ability to provide a reverse proxy."
"Application Gateway with application-level firewall tool and load distributor and balancer (also serves for A/B testing)."
"The most valuable features are the gateway and the ability to publish to sites."
"Valuable features include authentication, caching, reverse proxy routing, and load balancing."
"I find the solution’s community support and documentation most valuable. Compared to HAProxy, have found a lot of documentation and community support on Quora. If you would be asking me as a developer whether to choose this product, I would recommend this since it has good community support, documentation, and signature updates. The configuration of HAProxy is also very tedious. However, NGINX’s configuration is very simple."
"NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support."
"Nginx is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles."
 

Cons

"If you want logging for SMTP traffic, you have to enable ESP, which requires you to define allowed IP addresses. That’s irritating, to say the least."
"The ability to see live traffic is not great and can be improved."
"In the web interface, there are a lot of settings in the different menus and it would be helpful if there were an interactive help system or tooltips to help the administrators find and configure the right settings."
"I want to have the ability to pull a particular server. The DevOps portion was challenging for me, like if I needed to redirect from one IP to another URL. I needed to look that up, and the knowledge base is not well organized. When I look for information about Kemp on the Internet, I don't find many articles or something like that."
"I want Kemp LoadMaster to provide users with better reporting capabilities in relation to TCP packets. In general, the connections that are present in the system require improvement."
"It would be nice if the historical metrics were easily exportable from the interface."
"The configuration of the basic services is pretty straight forward but for more complex solutions, there needs to be better documentation or knowledge base articles."
"Hardware version needs a dual power solution."
"Initially, I experienced hiccups whenever I installed the application. As with any application, there were initial issues, however, after receiving support, everything was rectified."
"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."
"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."
"The user interface could be improved."
"The solution needs to be easier to setup and deploy."
"Our most challenging part was to run an older PHP website reverse-proxied through NGINX. That was not fun."
"The scalability could be improved."
"It would be great if there was even more automation to make it even easier to maintain."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Kemp LoadMaster is a tremendous value."
"Nowadays, going with the virtual appliance is the easiest way and the cost is reasonable."
"Download Kemp's VLM trial and take it for a test drive; you will be impressed."
"The price of the solution is cheap."
"The setup cost and pricing plan is reasonable and will ultimately give you a worthy return."
"The price is lower than other options."
"Currently, no cost is involved with a virtual load balancer. They have used open source. We did not pay for software. We paid for the expertise. We are only paying the consulting charges, which are very reasonable, that is, around a thousand dollars."
"At $2,500 USD, this is absolutely a fantastic buy for the money!"
"You pay for each feature that you want."
"The cost is reasonable."
"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
"The solution is free, but you can spend a lot of money with a complex solution."
"Nginx is free. I don't have experience with the Plus version."
"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours.​"
"I am not so happy with their pricing policy, but this is not the worse thing in my life. I can tolerate it."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
57%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Government
3%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Kemp LoadMaster?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten...The initial setup of Kemp LoadMaster is very simple.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kemp LoadMaster?
LoadMaster is cheaper than some other solutions. It has a perpetual license, so it's a one-time cost.
What needs improvement with Kemp LoadMaster?
There are some challenges with updates on certain models that don't have a few features. The support team often takes a lot of time to provide resolutions for issues. Also, I could see more capabil...
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.
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 any costs.
 

Also Known As

LoadMaster Load Balancer
NGINX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Kent County Council, KEMP, SMA Solar Technology AG, RT€ Player , Victrix (Quebec, Canada), Texas A&M, Macmillan Cancer Support, Cisco, Austin Bank
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 Kemp LoadMaster vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.