F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] Reviews

I work with F5 and my primary focus at the moment is F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]. I have been a customer of F5 many times, have been a partner, and have even been part of F5 Professional Services consultancy, not directly, but through a contractor company.

The features I find most valuable in F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] are the iRules, which are very powerful, and the flexibility to be able to script capabilities. The WAF is good, even though they have to add some AI to it. The WAF and iRules are very good.

The new features are ones that I find very useful, such as the AS3 automation, which is the declarative API. They are even making a new one in version 21 that has new features including control plane multi-threading, where you have the control plane on many CPUs, something F5 finally had to do after so many years.

TMOS is the operating system for F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] and is very complex, to be honest. However, if you use automation such as the declarative API, it becomes much easier. If you use AS3 automation, which is the declarative API for automating virtual server creation and so on, it becomes very friendly for automation, so you do not have to log in to F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]; you do everything through automation.

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support is something that definitely could be improved in F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only].

I mean HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocol support, as well as security for them too. For F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] to have better support for them would include load balancing, but also better WAF (Web Application Firewall) support for these two protocols.

Improving the mentioned HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support and the GUI would be beneficial. If they improve those things and add machine learning and AI, I want it to have some kind of AI on the box because everyone is going to AI, and they have to add some AI security to be able to check the traffic using AI models.

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocol support, AI, the GUI to be changed, and inline AI where the device downloads pre-built AI models from a SaaS cloud to check the traffic for security is something I think is very needed because using AI models as a replacement for signatures will be better. I think WAF signatures are a thing of the past.

I would also like to see HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 in the future as additional features, and anything else I would improve would definitely include HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.

I have been working with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] for almost ten years, around eight to nine years.

I face some complex bugs that need a lot of time to be solved, especially with their new hardware such as F5OS-A, R series, and Velos. They have new hardware platforms and they have had a lot of bugs that needed a lot of time to resolve.

Every load balancer has SSL/TLS, but it is good that F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] in the newer version supports TLS 1.3 with new cryptographic algorithms to protect from quantum computing. That is a new and useful feature that perhaps other vendors do not have support for. Being able to have TLS 1.3 with quantum cryptographic algorithms should protect you from quantum computing if someone tries to decrypt your traffic using quantum computers, which is definitely a useful feature.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is the market leader, and I would generally recommend it. I have worked with others such as Citrix NetScaler, which is not a bad product, but the support is awful. F5 support is very good compared to Citrix. Citrix support is very awful. F5 support is better; if you are a big company, you want to call someone and have that person react, the support to react in one or two days maximum, because if you are a big company paying big money, you cannot wait.

From one to ten, I would rate the technical support by F5 at an eight and a half. It was even a nine before, but now they have been having some issues.

The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is of medium complexity; I would say it is a medium level.

I have been working with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] for almost ten years, around eight to nine years.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is the market leader, and I would generally recommend it. I have worked with others such as Citrix NetScaler, which is not a bad product, but the support is awful. F5 support is very good compared to Citrix. Citrix support is very awful. F5 support is better; if you are a big company, you want to call someone and have that person react, the support to react in one or two days maximum, because if you are a big company paying big money, you cannot wait.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is expensive; it is very expensive, but they are the leader, so everyone buys F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]. The pricing is not a problem; they just have to improve the platform. The pricing is very expensive.

I have worked with other vendors such as FortiADC and A10; A10 is at the same level, but FortiADC for example was weaker. F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] data plane is very powerful; traffic is processed very quickly. There may be some weakness in HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support, but I think all vendors at the moment are not very good with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, to be honest.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is the market leader, and I would generally recommend it. I have worked with others such as Citrix NetScaler, which is not a bad product, but the support is awful. F5 support is very good compared to Citrix. Citrix support is very awful. F5 support is better; if you are a big company, you want to call someone and have that person react, the support to react in one or two days maximum, because if you are a big company paying big money, you cannot wait.

From one to ten, I would rate the technical support by F5 at an eight and a half. It was even a nine before, but now they have been having some issues.

I would rate this review an eight overall.

I use F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] for hosting my application and as a load balancer. I leverage all of its features under the LTM for various application use cases including redirection and host injection. Additionally, I use the WAF module of F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] as part of my application Layer 7 security.

For SSL, we terminate all of our TLS and SSL transactions on F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]. Any clients accessing the application from any geographic location across the world have their SSL handshake transaction handled by F5, which means there is no load on the backend application servers to handle those transactions. F5 takes care of it, giving us significant flexibility to handle the application and offload all the SSL handling load from the backend servers.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] helps us design how much load we need to keep on the system. When there are multiple application servers on the backend within a pool, and the application server team specifies that a particular number of applications should go to Server 1 and a specific number should go to Server 2 based on the capacity or resources of the backend server, we make those decisions accordingly and select the appropriate load balancing method and ratio to be configured. F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] even provides an option for priority group activation, allowing us to run the active standby mechanism on the backend server. In these cases, it gives us very flexible options to choose which method is most beneficial for our application requirements.

One of the biggest advantages for me as a customer of F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is that the product is stable, works as defined for any feature, and its performance is very stable, reliable, and easy to configure. Apart from that, it provides multiple options for customization, making the product very scalable.

Whenever we receive application requirements such as specific redirections, host injections, or any customization at the application level that the team does not want to do on the application side, they request whether F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] can accommodate it. F5 iRule is the custom option that allows us to run scripts and achieve all of our requirements and goals. That is why we use iRule for many different use cases based on requirements.

We are not using TMOS currently in F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]. We use simple iRules, where we can run scripts, create scripts, and achieve all of our use cases.

We are using the WAF module of F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only], which is specifically for Layer 7 protection. It safeguards not only OWASP Top 10 signatures but also provides an advanced feature set with the option to configure Layer 7 protection profiles at a granular level. It is also very flexible and scalable in terms of creating custom rules and providing security to our application.

SSL and TLS features in F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] are important to me for transaction security.

One of the areas for improvement in F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is the licensing part, as the cost is comparatively very high. Another consideration is that when you create a support case and need help with iRules, the support team will not assist you because they have kept iRule support up to the customers due to its scalability and scripting nature. If you need help creating an iRule for your specific use cases, that falls under their professional services. The support team will not provide direct help. For creating iRules or similar tasks, you need to work through it yourself to create a script without direct assistance from them. Although they have reference iRules already available on their platform for commonly used cases, for any specific use cases not available there, you need to work on your own.

I have been working on F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] for more than eight years.

For break-fixes in F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only], the support team is very capable. I would rate them nine out of ten.

There are two sides to the initial setup. If you know how F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] works and how to deploy it, it is very straightforward. If you are new to F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] and installing it for the first time, you definitely need to understand how it works, and it becomes complex at that point because there are different architectures available. You need to decide which architecture is suitable for your needs. In that case, you should know the technicalities and how it works. If you have that knowledge, it is much easier.

If you need the flexible option for load balancing with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] and you need a stable product with reliable performance in a large hosting environment, it is more suitable and gives you a return on investment. However, if you have a very small environment with just five or ten applications, it becomes questionable whether you should proceed because with only four or five applications, it is not as suitable given the high cost. The cost is not based on the number of applications but rather on the license type and which modules you procure. It is a logical decision to determine whether you should proceed with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] based on your environment.

I have reviewed NetScaler ADC, which has similar load balancing features comparable to F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]. Feature-wise, both F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] and NetScaler are similar, but for performance, reliability, and flexibility, F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is significantly ahead. There is no comparison.

I am a customer of F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] only. We have a cloud provider, but we do not have an F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] environment there. Based on the flexibility, product capacity, and performance of F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only], I would give it an overall rating of nine out of ten.

We use F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] quite a bit. We are migrating from F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] to the R-Series.

We terminate client connections on F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]. We use the SSL profiles on the VIPs for client connections to terminate the client connections.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is an application delivery controller that does what it says on the tin. We don't only use it for our application delivery. We use it as a firewall, we use it as routing, it does a WAF, and it functions beyond just a load balancer. We use a full set of its capabilities.

We use the Application Security Manager, the Advanced WAF as it is called now. We use this for north-south application threats. There is another team that deals with internal threats, but from the outside we use it to secure our websites. It is quite effective.

There is always room for improvement. I am uncertain about integration with any other security. We use F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] as a firewall in the perimeter device as well. I am not sure whether putting all eggs in one basket is a good thing. We are trying to integrate it with the FortiGates as the perimeter firewalls with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only], and then the VXLAN integration.

Automation is the big thing. How do you patch your security at the rate of AI? AI is massively involved in exposing security vulnerabilities and attacks as fast as patches are sent out. We are working on a four-weekly or monthly cadence when it used to be three months, four months, or even six months before a patch might affect us. Keeping up is the hard part.

We have been using this solution for ten years.

Our support for F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is very good. We have a very good relationship with the team that supports us.

I haven't got much to compare it against. The old technology of the Cisco CSS, Cisco ACE was all command-line driven and quite clunky. F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is definitely an improvement. I may be biased because I haven't really got anything to compare.

We do use iRules. We work in operations, so it is normally dictated by engineering and the requirements. iRules manipulate the traffic and steer it the right way, and we definitely use them.

We have to have a secure website, so I am not sure about enhanced, but we haven't had a problem with it.

My overall review rating for this solution is nine out of ten.

I have been a user, mostly in an enterprise customer environment where multiple F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] load balancers were hosted, and we were hosting our applications such as SaaS-based applications, using F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] for load balancing and caching compression, along with all those sorts of features.

I was generally involved with LTM and SSL, SSL offloading, caching and compression, and also GTM, which is BIG-IP DNS. We also worked on the same, but I have not worked on the security part. It is just that we had some set ASM profiles that we used to push. My experience is comparatively less on the security side, but mostly on the network side.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] certainly helped us to optimize traffic management for our needs. We had a very extensive iRule that we had written on a single virtual server. We used to host thousands of applications on only one VIP, and using the power of iRule, we could host multiple applications on a single address. The performance and everything and the business objectives were met very easily using the same.

We are able to evenly distribute the load between multiple application servers with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]'s advanced load balancing, and we can apply multiple functionalities such as persistence or if we want to insert any kind of cookie, we can easily do that using F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]'s inbuilt features or via iRule. It has positively affected our application performance and customer experience.

I think F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] can be improved, particularly on the metric side. I believe F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is working on something called F5 Insights, which I think is an upcoming feature. Currently, if you are using a hardware, on-premise load balancer, the metrics are very limited compared to other modern load balancers. There is a need for improvement to get better insights into the application by monitoring observability and all those sorts of things.

I have been working with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] for more than ten years, both with hardware and the virtual editions.

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten. They are good, but sometimes it is a little difficult to engage them on a call immediately. It does require some process and some time to engage them initially, but once they are connected, it becomes very easy to work through, and we are able to sort out the issues.

I have worked with NetScalers as well, and I am currently working with AVI load balancers, a VMware product, so I have worked with a couple of load balancers.

I have seen a couple of deployments using one-arm mode, two-arm mode, and all kinds of deployment across enterprises, so it was straightforward.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] TMOS is very easy to use. TMSH is very easy to fetch data, and the CLI is very easy to understand and very helpful for everyone who finds Linux core commands a little difficult. It is a very easy platform to interpret and understand for a beginner as well.

The experience has been good using F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] App Security Manager for safeguarding against threats. We were able to eliminate layer seven attacks by applying various policies and all kinds of security policies on our SaaS application side. I have a little bit less experience with the ASM, as I mentioned earlier, but we did use it. There was a security team within our organization that used it quite extensively.

We do utilize SSL/TLS features. Most of our applications are HTTPS. We offload our SSL certificate, and the certificate management is on our end. The connections from browser to F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] are already encrypted using that, and it is also encrypted back to the backend servers. The speed and the SSL speed that it provides in encryption and decryption is quite good, and it is better if you compare it to any other vendors such as AVI or NetScaler. It is very good compared to other vendors.

I am not much aware of the pricing, but I know it is comparatively expensive than other vendors. However, I think it is value for money. I have not yet had to deal with the part wherein I had to take care of the pricing part, but I know that it is a little higher than the competitors.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is the best option on the market without any question.

Talking about the virtual edition, I am not really sure. We have deployed virtual instances over the Oracle Cloud, and I really do not remember where we purchased it from. I think we downloaded it from the marketplace and probably bought licenses from F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]'s side, but I am not very clear about it.

We have a team of approximately twenty to twenty-five people using F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] in our company. We work across shifts, and everyone who manages the network infrastructure has access, so they are using it to manage.

I cannot think of anything that F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is not doing right now in terms of the application delivery security module. There are a lot of things in the pipeline. As I mentioned, I have attended a lot of F5 events. F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is working on integrating monitoring and also the distributed cloud, which can be integrated with your local environment. There is a lot of potential for improvements ahead, but I cannot think of anything right now. I give this review a rating of ten out of ten.

My use cases for F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] include working on F5 ASM, and I feel the differentiator is their iRule and the detection capability, which will be differentiators compared to others in the market.

The iRules scripting has helped customize traffic management for my needs by allowing certain customization where we need to do application changes, and we have been able to achieve those use cases without any changes on the application side by modifying everything in the iRule itself.

What I appreciate about F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is the detection capability compared to others in the market, and the way they understand the application, along with the customization that iRule gives, which is far beyond what is available in the market when comparing to their competitors including Radware, Array, and other vendors.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]'s ability to simplify application delivery as nine, which is the highest rating.

My experience using F5's App Security Manager for safeguarding against threats has been positive.

SSL/TLS features enhance my transaction security because, in my implementations, the customers do not have an HSM; with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] doing the SSL offloading, all my certificates and keys are stored in one place instead of multiple servers, and I have hardened this appliance, making it feel more secure compared to SSL offloading done on the servers.

From an application load balancing perspective, most of the competition has similar functions, but I do not have many complicated use cases at this time; it works well for me, although I have not explored many of the options available in F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only].

I would appreciate improvements in the UI because F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]'s traditional UI differs from others that have made their interfaces more user-friendly; F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]'s approach is still traditional, with upgrades that are still manual, while competition has made upgrades easy with one-click processes.

I do not have any specific features that I would want to see included in F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] in the future or enhanced in it at this time.

I have been working with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] for more than five years.

Regarding stability, I believe F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is performing very well compared to the competition.

F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is scalable.

I would evaluate the technical support as no more than seven on a scale of one to ten.

The tech support could improve in how the issues are handled, as they tend to work on their own terms without taking calls despite escalations, so there should be a way to escalate and troubleshoot over a call.

The initial setup is slightly complicated compared to other solutions.

I agree that F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] brings ROI; however, since everyone sees it as a costlier solution, breaking that perception complicates pitching F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] solutions.

My thoughts on the pricing, setup cost, and licensing part of F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] are that for some markets, F5 prices are not competitive with what the competition is offering; although it tries to deliver value, customers perceive F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] as a costlier solution, and to change this perception, F5 should be more aggressive with their pricing model.

I have experience working with firewalls, network security components, and technologies such as SIEM and SOAR similar to F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]. I would rate F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] with an overall rating of eight out of ten.

Our company's use case for F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] was that we were the test case, the first case for their integration.

I use F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] for probably the biggest Croatian webshop.

By HAProxy, I mean the basic service, because HAProxy has ALOHA, which is a paid service. The nice thing is that F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] has a web interface for configuration.

I appreciate the integration part. It also has partitions, so different sites can be almost physically separated. That's a nice thing. However, the whole interface is a bit bloated and a bit complicated.

The best features for me in the product are that geotagging is very nicely incorporated and rule creation for incoming traffic is very user-friendly.

Advanced load balancing does not affect my application performance; it's very nicely integrated. It's very easy to drop a server from the pool. It has divided features to disable a node and to drop complete traffic from that node at that moment. It's very nice that there are two options for it. When deploying new code, it's very user-friendly and very nicely integrated.

SSL and TLS technology are important for transaction security. Of course, you can't go without them today. It's nice that F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] supports the latest TLS 1.3 and the incoming TLS 1.4, which is not yet widely used.

I see a drawback with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only]: pools and nodes are two features that are very similar and shouldn't be divided like that, because they are almost the same thing. There are just a few options that are different. Also, deploying SSL certificates is a bit confusing because there are certificates used for its own intelligence part, called server certificates and client certificates. However, those are not client SSL certificates; they are server SSL certificates, which are used to re-encode instead of doing TLS termination.

The interface to deploy the certificate is also a bit complicated because you need to deploy the certificate, create a profile for the server, and then link that profile to that server. That part could be a bit more intuitive.

I started working with F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] two months ago and have that much experience.

I would agree that F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] is a 99% stable and reliable product for my use case; it can guarantee a 99.99% uptime SLA, for sure.

We are just using master-slave configuration replication with timed failovers. I would say scalability is also pretty straightforward.

We used our sister company for first-level support, and those are rare situations.

I have been using some products similar to F5, and I'd say only HAProxy.

The installation phase and deployment for F5 BIG-IP [Private Offer Only] are pretty straightforward. They offer hardware appliances or virtual appliances, so their offer is complete.

The installation is also pretty straightforward.

I have it on-premise as a virtual appliance.

Our sister company is an integrator for F5.

I do see value for money with the product, but I personally prefer to configure things myself and use HAProxy. However, since it was an implementation scenario, that was the main reason it was implemented in a sister company.

When speaking of the price, for its features, I would say it's adequate.

I buy directly from F5.

I believe F5 is the best among competitors. There are a few close ones, but it still remains the best tool.

What stands out for me among other competitors is that the price is not too high, but it has the most complete set of features.

The iRules scripting feature is not important to me personally, as I don't use it.

With security in the product, since we use ModSecurity for all our web servers, we are not relying very much on that feature. We are mostly configuring ModSecurity with our custom rules on our web servers.

I would give it a rating of nine out of ten, just because of the interface.