NGINX Plus Reviews

I am generally satisfied with NGINX Plus; it is good, the policies are fine-tuned and superb, but there are vulnerabilities in that platform which were exploited in the wild some months last year.

Load balancing in NGINX Plus is used by the IT team mostly because they manage it; from the security perspective, I focus on the policies and the signatures and how they are configured.

The web application firewall feature has helped enhance security for our applications because most of the attacks which are performed on our website are being blocked by it, so the web application firewall is good.

Operation is very good; we have not much impact because most of our attacks from different countries are blocked to it, and we have also whitelisted and blacklisted some countries, so the traffic is also very minimal, and the attacks which have been detected are also from a region from where the traffic is allowed, but it is very minimal, and the detection capabilities are also good.

There were some vulnerabilities in F5.

They tried to fix it, but the fixes were not available at the time because they were zero days, so they attempted to fix it, but their support was not proper.

Their support should be improved because sometimes features which we need for customization take time, and they are sometimes feasible and sometimes not feasible by the team, so their support and the engineering team should improve their product.

I would like to see more features regarding customization which should be built into the application, and the tool optimization should be good, and the dashboard should be more crisp and clear.

I have been working with NGINX Plus for three years.

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten.

Response time is good because they have assigned and dedicated support engineers to us, and we have weekly cadence calls. If we have any issues with the product, we discuss that, and they also provide us any updates if there are any major changes with new features or whatever we need.

Positive

I was part of the configuration for the initial setup.

It was not that straightforward, but it was fine; we were able to manage it, and it took time.

Integrations were the difficulties I faced with the deployment.

We have seen a return on investment with NGINX Plus, and we have calculated that based on our analysis.

Pricing is reasonable and that is fine.

Applications were particularly problematic to integrate with NGINX Plus, and because sometimes there were customers facing applications which were not integrated properly. I would rate this review an eight out of ten overall.

I use NGINX to port our local server to a public server where people can access the URL. The main use case is for reverse proxy to support our local server, making it publicly accessible through our DNS system.

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.

One area of improvement could be that NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates. This would eliminate the need to use third-party software such as SaaS Boost for generating these certificates.

I have been working with NGINX for seven months.

NGINX is very stable. In my use case, I require ninety-nine point nine percent uptime, and NGINX has been pivotal in helping me achieve this along with our other DNS services. I have not encountered any stability issues.

While some people use NGINX for web servers, my current use case focuses on networking and tunneling, which does not necessitate much scaling. However, by adding more resources to our system, I can maintain and ensure everything runs smoothly.

Prior to NGINX, I didn't use any other similar solutions.

The initial setup of NGINX was straightforward and very easy. It was completed in about one hour.

The entire deployment process required only one person.

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.

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

I did not evaluate other options because NGINX is popular in the tech world and was an easy choice for me.

NGINX is a great product for anyone interested in reverse proxy. It is a reliable solution and has proven effective in my use case. I would recommend it to anyone considering similar needs. 

The overall product rating is ten out of ten.

I primarily use this solution for API management, WebSocket, and WebServer.

I use NGINX, which is integrated with our engineering server, SparkFi. We are using NGINX Plus, which functions as a responsible application, serving as a reverse proxy and a small web server. For API management, the WebSocket, and the WebServer, NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support.

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 have been using the engineering solution for two months.

At this moment, it is stable.

I receive very good support.

Neutral

The solution offers a cost advantage.

Not much maintenance is required. My experience spans six to seven applications. Initially, I had hiccups whenever I installed the application. After receiving support, everything was rectified. I am happy with it now. For the initial hiccups, I received adequate support, and as of now, I am content with the solution. 

Overall product rating: 8 out of ten.

We use the solution for application transactions. It is used for our corporate business and customer-facing applications.

The solution enables good messaging between two data centers. The product is resilient. It provides a single API. It is a pretty solid solution.

The solution does transactions across data centers. It also integrates with F5 solutions.

The solution must improve its performance. Sometimes, it could be because of how a customer has implemented the tool, but it is a potential bottleneck. The product must provide a holistic view of flows to help us understand the endpoints a particular transaction went through.

I have been using the solution for eight years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the tool’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Support and troubleshooting could be a challenge. For each layer we go through, we need to get an SME. If it is F5, we need a person from F5. Then, if we get into NGINX, we need someone from NGINX. Sometimes, it can be the same person. Since it is another solution on a stack, it can be challenging. F5 has good support. It’s been pretty good.

Neutral

The tool is pretty easy to deploy.

We see an ROI on the solution. If we didn't use NGINX, the app teams and developers would have to find more resources for development. If we didn't have a layer that handled the transactions into Rancher, the developers would have to redo their API calls and increase development costs.

The cost is reasonable.

We are thinking about doing a service mesh. It's a pretty big architecture. It changes the whole front door and transactions. It will probably replace NGINX. People who want to use the solution must keep the hops to a minimum.

Every technology on the infrastructure adds some latency. Keep the transaction flows to less than three hops. Hit F5, hit NGINX, and then hit the app layer. If we get too fancy, we will face additional troubleshooting burdens and latency.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I am a reseller. A lot of customers use this solution on cloud and on-premises. Typically, people use NGINX to build their own CDN solutions, so it often goes into CDN deployments. Most apps have NGINX OSS as the underlying base, whether they're cloud apps or on-premises apps. NGINX is the free version of NGINX Plus.

F5 is now creating buzz in the market because if you migrate to NGINX Plus, you'll get a 30 minute response time from F5 or the NGINX team if you have any challenges with the solution, so that's an advantage. 

NGINX Plus can give you multiple features from a load balancing perspective. The standard NGINX OSS doesn't have that.

There are about 400 million websites that run NGINX OSS. Since NGINX was an open source company until F5 acquired it in 2019, NGINX doesn't have a lot of paid products. In the last year and a half, the F5 and NGINX teams have started doing the sales pitch for people to upgrade to the paid version, like Red Hat, which has an open source version and a paid version. We're seeing good uptake, but I don't think they have been able to cover more than 10% of the user base.

For most of the companies I have interacted with, 90% of them are using NGINX because it's a favorite open source solution. People are now using NGINX Plus because F5 just started selling it in the last year and a half. Out of the 90% who are using it, there are about 10-15% who are using the paid version.

It definitely improves functioning. The virtual load balancing applications from F5, Radware, or any other provider are typically very heavy apps and demand at least 8 to 16 CPU of processing power. Typically, each of the install files are 3GB or 4GB, compared to NGINX Plus, which is hardly 3 or 4MB. It installs very quickly and is very easy to manage when you're doing orchestration or automation.

NGINX is very DevOps friendly compared to other load balancing modules from F5, Radware, or Citrix.

NGINX OSS typically doesn't give you enough persistence while NGINX Plus does, so that is an advantage. If you're using NGINX Plus as a load balancer in the front of your deployment, in front of your Kubernetes stack, or in your microservices deployment, then you will need persistence as a part of it. From an application perspective, you can still use NGINX OSS in general.

NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps. F5 has developed some capabilities on NGINX as well, so they're giving it a separate, payable module on NGINX. It's also a good solution for your microservices deployment.

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.

I have been selling this solution for more than two years.

It's a stable solution. Customers who have deployed it haven't seen major issues. They're typically happy with it.

It is highly scalable. NGINX Plus is deployed on AWS or GCP and can seamlessly scale up or scale down depending on the requirements.

A lot of our customers have moved from Apache. Apache has a scalability issue and a concurrency issue.

Basic deployment can be done in 60 to 90 minutes.

If you're going into automation, you need one or two engineers maximum who will do the deployment and installation. If the user is self-sufficient and in DevOps, then you don't need anybody else.

There are two kinds of sales motions. One is that somebody is already an NGINX open source customer, and we are upgrading some of the critical elements in that particular network. If we have a deployment of 50 or 100 servers and 10 of them are doing load balancing or running a Kubernetes controller, then I will deploy NGINX Plus for those. I will not deploy it for the entire application because the Kubernetes cluster controller can definitely regenerate the OSS modules or spin up more modules. In that situation, customers will do the deployment themselves because they're aware of the application they're using and the value they want to see.

If there's a sales motion where you're proposing a solution like a CDN and it's a mix of both F5 plus NGINX, then our people will typically work on the deployment of the solution or we'll have a partner work with the customer to do the deployment.

A lot of people don't know that Plus offers much better features than the OSS version. In an organization that's running a private CDN, they might have thousands of instances right now. 

Moving to NGINX Plus is a huge cost. The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500. If you upgrade all the thousands of instances, it can cost up to $6 million for optimization, which some customers may not be willing to do for all of the instances.

I would rate this solution nine out of ten. 

A lot of deployments are moving to the cloud, so many people will stop buying traditional load balancers like the F5 hardware or even the F5 virtual machines. Deployment and configuration take a lot of time. NGINX is much easier to deploy and configure, and the skillset required to handle 

NGINX is more available in the market compared to deploying F5, Radware, or Citrix. If F5 is able to bring in more features on NGINX Plus, like an Ingress controller or something like that, we will see a lot of people going for solutions like NGINX.

HAProxy is a similar solution. They aren't 100% competition, but they are good in the market. People will start moving to those kinds of solutions instead of traditional load balancing like F5 or Citrix. Once there's a lot of movement to the cloud and microservices applications, traditional load balancers will start becoming redundant.

We use NGINX as a reverse proxy. For example, if you access www.google.com, NGINX accepts the external traffic and forwards it to the internal application servers.

NGINX can also be used for load balancing, which makes it better than Apache in a lot of cases. Additionally, it functions as both a reverse proxy and a web server, offering a lot of flexibility.

Moreover, it performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.

I would like the configuration process to be more simplified. Both Apache and NGINX involve some complex configuration steps. Easier configuration and troubleshooting would make it a perfect ten for me.

I've used NGINX Plus for about one and a half years. However, I'm not actively configuring it right now since I'm working on microservices.

I've deployed NGINX Plus both within AWS EC2 instances and on our on-premises virtual machines.

I haven't experienced any major performance issues.

Around 100 people had access to it. In my previous team, around 10 to 14 engineers were actively using it for configuration and management.

It's quite scalable. We can host multiple frontend applications on it.

I used Apache. I configured Apache as a web server for a front-end web application deployment. I used it on a Linux virtual machine.

I actively used Apache for over a year. We configured applications for front-end hosting and used Apache as a web server to route traffic from the public to the virtual machine. It was listening on port 80 or 443 and forwarding traffic to the internal application.

I used it more than a year ago. Since then, I've primarily been using NGINX.

I've installed NGINX several times, and it was straightforward. It was not a tedious task, so the process was easy. 

NGINX's graphical user interface is fine. I've deployed frontend applications.   

There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free. There's also NGINX Plus, which is a paid version with additional features.

I would recommend it because it's a very versatile tool for load balancing and other scenarios. For example, you can use it to host front-end applications.

I would give NGINX an eight out of ten. It's great for load balancing, reverse proxying, and serving as a web server. Its versatility makes it superior to Apache in many ways. I haven't tried other similar tools, so that's why I wouldn't give it a perfect ten.

The primary use cases involve using NGINX for various features including WAF, API security, DDoS protection, and bot protection. Additionally, it facilitates network discovery and provides visibility into network activities, allowing us to uncover solutions and identify any areas we might have missed.

I utilize NGINX for its capability to provide visibility and discovery options. It helps discover and identify networks, which is crucial for ensuring application performance, managing latency, and checking server reachability. NGINX communicates with XE and uses Linux command terminology, thus providing visibility by interacting with the nearest POP.

The need for human involvement is high due to the complexity of NGINX's Linux-based terminology. More tactics and techniques can enhance its usability. Additionally, it is not a cost-effective solution for few applications.

We have been using this technology for the last five to ten years, so we are familiar with how it works.

I have not encountered any challenges with NGINX's stability, as it works effectively with Big IP, XC, and Palo Alto.

Support is available in the market with options like FYSE, which provides assistance during critical tasks.

We have experience using Palo Alto Networks, Sophos, SonicWall Firewalls, and other technologies.

NGINX is not cost-effective, especially for few applications, and is considered higher-priced.

Alternatives evaluated include Redway, cloud solutions, and services providing CDN options. Some gaps exist in NGINX not covering certain API options.

I would rate the solution an eight and a half out of ten. It's important to understand the requirements before recommending its implementation.

I find NGINX Plus incredibly versatile. It is my go-to for serving web content efficiently, balancing loads across servers, and securely managing traffic as a reverse proxy. Plus, it is fantastic for streaming ports like SMTP and handling non-SAP protocol traffic.

Using NGINX Plus for web traffic distribution is fantastic. It offers performance similar to physical load balancers but with added flexibility. However, I have faced challenges with DNS configurations. Sometimes, updates to domain name IPs take time to reflect, causing delays or caching issues.

In terms of improvement, I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks. This would allow users to easily create and manage policies, rules, load balancers, and traffic shaping without relying solely on the command line interface. 

Additionally, another area for improvement in NGINX Plus is its integration with NGINX App Protect. Currently, to utilize NGINX Protect, you need to have NGINX Plus, which might not be necessary for everyone. It would be beneficial to have the option to use NGINX Protect independently without requiring NGINX Plus.

I have been using NGINX Plus for a couple of years.

It is a fairly stable solution.

NGINX Plus is scalable and allows us to increase server capacity according to our desired configurations.

Setting up NGINX Plus is generally straightforward and not very complex. While some modules may not be included in the documentation, finding and installing them is manageable. The deployment process is relatively simple and can be started right away, especially if you have prior knowledge of NGINX. 

For deploying and maintaining NGINX Plus, the team size varies based on the environment's scale. In a large setup, we might need four to five people, while in smaller environments, two technically sound individuals can handle it.

The return on investment for NGINX Plus depends on factors like cost and management ease. Compared to hardware load balancers, NGINX Plus can be pricier, but it offers flexibility and scalability. However, other hardware load balancers like Array may have lower upfront costs and easier setup.

The pricing of NGINX Plus is a bit steep compared to other options I have used. NGINX Plus licensing is annual or three-year based, and it is socket-based. You pay for the license according to the number of server sockets you need. The license is bound to a specific server or virtual server, so it can't be used across multiple servers unless you opt for a multi-tenant license.

NGINX Plus greatly improved my API management and delivery. I configured multiple routes with load balancing and efficient logging, which helped troubleshoot issues effectively. While the dashboard lacked customization, the product performed well, offering about 80% similarity to NGINX open source with additional modules and support. Its scalability allowed me to upgrade server resources rather than invest in new hardware, saving costs as my traffic increased.

Using load balancing with NGINX, both in the open-source version and NGINX Plus, improved service reliability. While the open-source version required manual reconfiguration if a server went down, NGINX Plus's traffic monitoring automatically detects and removes faulty servers, ensuring seamless traffic management. 

NGINX Plus's caching mechanism is highly effective in speeding up web content delivery. 

I would recommend NGINX Plus to those seeking an alternative to hardware-based load balancers. However, it is important to note that NGINX Plus is quite technical, primarily command-line-based with less emphasis on GUI. While support is available, administrators should be comfortable with technical configurations. Compared to GUI-based load balancers, NGINX Plus offers flexibility but requires more technical expertise for setup and management.

Overall, I would rate NGINX Plus as a six out of ten.

We are using servers as web servers, and I redirect them to NGINX.

When you use NGINX, you have more options and power. You don't need to use anything else. I have web servers that integrate with other web servers you need to use, for example, Apache, IIS, or anything else.

NGINX integrates well with your environment. It's better using NGINX than Apache.

The user interface could be improved. NGINX is also too poor with streaming. We could have a better solution for streaming besides NGINX.

I've been using NGINX Plus for about 20 years or more.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is not difficult. You need to have some experience, of course. When installing the solution, you just edit some text files. It could be simpler if you have a user interface, but you must know how to edit a text file.

I have 100% seen a return on investment with NGINX Plus.

The solution is free, but you can spend a lot of money with a complex solution.

I mainly use the cloud because it's for the Internet. But I have some cases where we need to use the solution internally or locally. But we mainly deploy the solution on the cloud.

Before choosing NGINX Plus, one should ask an expert to help them. I rate NGINX Plus a ten out of ten.

I primarily use NGINX Plus as a reverse proxy, and it does an excellent job. 

NGINX Plus is a crucial tool that helps me tackle various problems and challenges. Its versatility and capabilities make it invaluable for implementing patches and fixes when necessary.

NGINX Plus is incredibly valuable to me because it excels at being a reverse proxy, offering seamless failover, and it works perfectly for my needs.

Improvement needed in NGINX Plus could focus on optimizing memory usage for users.

I have been using NGINX Plus for two years.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.

The product is very scalable. I would give it a ten out of ten for scalability.

Technical support is very good. I have used it only once and it is great. I would rate it a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy. 

I have definitely seen ROI with NGINX Plus.

I believe NGINX Plus offers very reasonable pricing for companies. Although I didn't buy it myself, companies that did found it to be affordable, especially with free versions available for specific needs.

I would recommend NGINX Plus to others. It is a good product and it is very user-friendly. Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten.