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NGINX App Protect pros and cons

Vendor: F5

4.1 out of 5

27 reviews
96% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

NGINX App Protect is renowned for its exceptional load balancing, handling up to 70,000 requests per second, robust security features including OWASP certification, and seamless DevOps integration. While offering notable return on investment, challenges include complex licensing, time-consuming UI policy settings, and delayed support. Its scalability is commendable but slow, with limitations in microservice architecture support and costly upgrades. It provides excellent application protection, enhancing organizational security despite some operational drawbacks.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

NGINX App Protect is praised for its load balancing capabilities and exceptional stability, handling 60,000 to 70,000 requests per second.

NGINX App Protect offers valuable features like auto-learning for application profiling, bot and force protection, and is OWASP certified, enhancing security.

NGINX App Protect excels with complete control over HTTP sessions, flexibility in policies based on technology, and seamless DevOps integration.

NGINX App Protect's scalability and easy deployment are key advantages, along with its ability to operate in a DevOps environment with API and pipeline configuration.

NGINX App Protect offers excellent protection for published services against application attacks, offering a strong return on investment and a positive impact on organizational security.

CONS

Setting policies and parameters through the UI is manual and time-consuming, with only one rule editable at a time.

Deployment scalability takes a long time, and it's not designed for microservice architecture.

The licensing model is complex and becomes expensive quickly.

The technical support response time can be delayed, and sometimes lacks the necessary skills to resolve issues.

Upgrading custom rules and implementation could be simplified, with more information on deployment requirements needed.

NGINX App Protect Pros review quotes

Platform Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Oct 8, 2018

It is a very good tool for load balancing.

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AI

Chief Technology Officer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Jan 26, 2020

The most valuable feature is that I can establish different services from the firewall.

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Manager - Cyber Security (SOC) at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 13, 2020

The most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found.

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NGINX App Protect

Free Report: NGINX App Protect Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about NGINX App Protect. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.

885,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1270980

Product Manager - Technical at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 19, 2020

WAF is useful to track mitigation, inclusion, prevention, and the parametric firewall.

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reviewer1652268

Head Competence Center Agile & Communication at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 7, 2021

We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working.

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reviewer1759533

Head Of Information Security at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 12, 2022

The policies are flexible based on the technologies you use.

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OD

Technical Expert at SFR

Feb 16, 2022

The initial setup was simple and took three to four days.

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reviewer1788060

Senior Network and Security Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Feb 22, 2022

NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session.

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reviewer1804125

Tech Lead Security at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Mar 16, 2022

NGINX App Protect is stable.

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Ntwrkengine0887

Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 6, 2022

The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its flexibility.

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NGINX App Protect Cons review quotes

Platform Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Oct 8, 2018

The contributions I think sometimes take a toll on you like you're going to spend a lot of time on the right contributions.

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AI

Chief Technology Officer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Jan 26, 2020

The configuration needs to be more flexible because it is difficult to do things that are outside of the ordinary.

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Manager - Cyber Security (SOC) at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 13, 2020

Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time.

Read full review

NGINX App Protect

Free Report: NGINX App Protect Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about NGINX App Protect. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.

885,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1270980

Product Manager - Technical at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 19, 2020

It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput.

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reviewer1652268

Head Competence Center Agile & Communication at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 7, 2021

As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment.

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reviewer1759533

Head Of Information Security at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 12, 2022

The dashboard could provide a more comprehensive view of the status of the connections.

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OD

Technical Expert at SFR

Feb 16, 2022

Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks.

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reviewer1788060

Senior Network and Security Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Feb 22, 2022

Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment.

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reviewer1804125

Tech Lead Security at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Mar 16, 2022

The integration of NGINX App Protect could improve.

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Ntwrkengine0887

Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 6, 2022

The setup of NGINX App Protect is complex. The full process took one week to complete. Additionally, we had to change the network infrastructure platform which took one month.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 24)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Container Security

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Container Security

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs NGINX App Protect

Checkmarx One vs NGINX App Protect

Imperva Application Security Platform vs NGINX App Protect

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs NGINX App Protect

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs NGINX App Protect

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

TrendAI Vision One – Cloud Security vs NGINX App Protect

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Akamai App and API Protector vs NGINX App Protect

Azure Web Application Firewall vs NGINX App Protect

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs NGINX App Protect

SUSE NeuVector vs NGINX App Protect

See all alternatives

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