NGINX Plus alternatives and competitors

For everything, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is used. We used it for our exchange server before migrating to Teams, and then for Skype. It currently operates several large broadcasting and streaming services.

Our jump server is quite large. To keep the high number of connections, we had to deploy it behind the F5. That saved us a lot of time and achieved our goal of having a stable jump server. When you put it behind an F5, you divide the connections between a couple of nodes, which was something we didn't have before.

We are using almost all of the features. What we like best about this solution is its stability. It is extremely stable.

So far, everything appears to be fine. I wouldn't be the best person to comment on something like APIs because I haven't really dug into a lot of APIs. However, I believe F5 falls a little short when it comes to APIs. But I'm not certain.

I have been running F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for nine years.

We haven't done an upgrade in three years.

It is being used internally. We have a large number of internal services.  We kept a few services, say two or three services that are being published, but it's primarily intended for our internal services.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is very stable.

We are a broadcast company. We have streaming services running behind this box. This streaming service has been released, with 19 to 20 streams. We haven't received any complaints about these streams since the streaming service was deployed behind F5. Despite the fact that these streams consume a lot of bandwidth and have millions of sessions. We haven't received many complaints about them.

It reaches a point where scaling is no longer possible. Assume you have two boxes, and you want to expand. You can divide it into what is known as vices or virtual systems, but then you're stuck. This is where, NGINX comes in, in a better way, where you can simply scale up by adding more VMs or appliances without running into problems because you have an NGINX controller that controls everything.

The users are mostly administrators and network engineers like myself. The number of end users is somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000.

They were extremely helpful in both SLA and non-SLA cases. An SLA case is one in which assistance is required, and the assistance must provide you with a solution.

Technical support was also helpful in non-SLA cases where I requested assistance, as well as in sharing guides and documents.

I would rate the technical support a four and a half out of five.

Positive

We are using a combination of F5 and NGINX.

I am still relatively new to NGINX. We recently implemented it in our environment.

We are interested in NGINX. We would like to explore the NGINX platform. It has multiple platforms such as security, APIs, and application gateways.

We are looking into it, as well as the LTM module of it.

We are also interested in learning more about Kemp LoadMaster.

Nothing goes as smoothly as you might expect, but it wasn't all that difficult. We had a few issues at first, but it's been running very smoothly since then.

I wasn't present when F5 was installed. It has been nine years. However, I have completed a few deployments in one of the branch offices, and to be honest, it wasn't all that complicated.

Because it was a new deployment, it didn't require any strategy, migration plan, or anything else.

We do not use third-party vendors. Everything is completed in-house.

This solution is managed by two network engineers, myself, and a colleague.

I would rate the ROI a three out of five.

I would rate the pricing a three out of five.

There are no additional fees to the standard licensing fee; everything is paid once.

I was comparing products like Apache Web Server, F5 LTM, Fortinet FortiADC, Kemp LoadMaster, and NGINX Plus.

It depends on the use case. However, if you are not interested in the application side, F5 would be useful. If you just want a load balancer that balances multiple servers, that's all you need. Not basic, but basic to intermediate material. F5 takes first place with no one even close to matching it. However, if you want to go deeper and more advanced, you should look into NGINX or any other vendor that has more options or more features.

As a network engineer, I am totally happy with the product.

I would rate F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) a nine out of ten.

The use case is very isolated right now. It's got very specific use cases. It's not a product that we deploy across due to our support infrastructure.

Whether or not it improves our environment just now is 50/50. I can't say that it does. And I can't say that it harms it either as they're very specific use cases. Our operational support infrastructure does not have the knowledge base to support it yet. It's still a work in progress.

The integration into the host environment is the most valuable aspect right now.

The solution is stable.

It's fairly easy to get it up and running. 

It doesn't match the development structure or user community of our existing product. It pales in comparison to that.

It's not fully grown up. Other people might think that, however, our comparison against a product line that we use shows it's not as grown up as the existing product line.

We'd like it to be more open to third-party integration.

Their salespeople can be a bit aggressive. They're trying to get into an area that is dominated by large vendors elsewhere. So they tend to be a little bit more aggressive than some people would like.

We haven't used it too much. We are running a comparison analysis right now. 

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's scalable to a point, however, not in comparison to our hardware platforms. It's not as scalable as that. It is a software product and due to how our infrastructure is, it's very hard to scale. Auto scale is what we would want based on our management infrastructure.

Most of the people who use it regularly are application developers. 

I'm not sure if we will increase usage. We're still analyzing it and have to do that at a larger scale first.

I've dealt with support in the past. It's limited only as it's not a full-scale production deployment. They're very individualized use cases.

Once you get it set up, it's straightforward. It takes longer than a typical hardware product as it is a software product, and due to the fact that there are different teams that we have to work with to get it built out that we don't really manage over. The setup is a little bit longer than a typical scenario with our focus product.

A very small number of people handle any maintenance tasks as it's not fully implemented yet.

Everything primarily s done in-house. For these types of product lines, we do the implementations ourselves.

We haven't yet seen an ROI as we have very specific use cases right now. 

The pricing is good. It's pretty inexpensive. 

The pricing is moderate. I'd rate it a three out of five in terms of affordability.

We looked at other options. We have our main product line. We evaluated this, and other vendors as well. We evaluated NGINX, for example, and everything in all scenarios. My main concern is this solution is not as mature as other options. 

I'm not sure which version number we are on. It's one of the latest, I assume. We don't run the latest. We usually are either one or two versions behind.

It is something we are exploring. We do have use cases and it will compete against our existing product line. That would have to go in the second half of this year. Right now, it's more of a comparison of how we use it right now. We don't use it really in production. We are going to definitely explore it and do our comparison and more in-depth analysis of the product and compare it against our existing product line.

I'd advise potential users to do a very in-depth analysis of the products in comparison. And don't just look at the cover of it - really look into the detailed backend support infrastructure and if it can be implemented the way you need it to be.

I'd rate the solution five out of ten. It's not a fully mature product.

The product is an open-source load balancer. We deploy it for our application as a front-end server where all the users come on that particular HAProxy server, and it is redirected to our back-end servers.

It helps include the reverse proxy or more security modules for enhancing security. It helps with enhancing web application security.

The solution is open-source. 

HAProxy can provide protocol-level load balancing. We can use the HTTP or HTTPS load balancing, including the PCP and UDP protocol level load balancing.

The setup is straightforward.

It is scalable.

The solution is stable. 

It's saved project costs and time. Since the deployment is very easy and the open-source functionality saves a huge amount of cost in terms of project deployment.

The product should have more security and dashboard functionality for monitoring so that any administrator can see the usability and track all the incoming and outgoing requests. It should have a better dashboard GUI, and more security models should be there. The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs. We need it to be more visible.

Documentation could be better.

I've used the solution for around four years. We started using it in 2018.

It's reliable and very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

It's a scalable product.

There are more than 2,000 users on the product right now. 

We already scaled up with the different sets, so we previously scaled this solution.

I did not solicit the help of any technical support. 

The documentation that's available on the HAProxy is okay. There is some room for improvement in that regard. 

Neutral

We previously used a traditional load balancer.

We used a TCP load balancer. The NGNIX, we use for the reverse proxy for HTTP and HTTPS protocol. However, for particular applications, we required TCP load balancer, so we used HAProxy there.

HAProxy provides the TCP and UDP port protocol-based load balancing, and NGINX is the reverse proxy, providing a great solution for web traffic, HTTP, and HTTPS.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not too complex. 

One single administrator can manage and deploy this product.

I handled the deployment of the product myself. 

We just replaced some of our OEM solutions with an open-source solution. We did not invest anything in that, we just save the money on some OEM products. We have to purchase some load balancers, however, we replaced this with the open-source option and they are performing well. Therefore, there is a return on investment in the sense that we replaced that traditional load balancer that we paid for.

We do not need to pay for the product as it is open-source. 

There's no additional cost. We can deploy and manage on our own, and community support is available in HAProxy.

We evaluated NGINX prior to using this product.

If you require a TCP and UDP protocol for load balancing, this is a very great solution.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We used this mostly for disaster recovery plan (DRP), for global service load balancing, and Citrix Access Gateway. 

What I found most valuable from Citrix ADC were the Content Switching and Integrated Caching features which were the things we commonly installed for our customers.

The only thing customers told me that could be improved is that they would like to be able to purchase and receive the products in one box, rather than two boxes. This is something related to marketing, though.

We were partners with Citrix for 15 years. We used it for 15 years.

I also found this solution to be stable.

I found it to be scalable.

Our customers' feedback was that support wasn't the best. Cases were often on queue and there were delays in solving their issues, leading to customers getting angry. Support could be improved.

I was able to try F5 and Radware. The price for Citrix ADC here in Mexico was good when you compare it with F5 and Radware.

The setup was easy. For the first version of this solution, it was not very user-friendly, but in the last edition we used, the setup was very user-friendly.

We implemented it for our customers through our in-house team of 3 consultants. I think 3 people is sufficient for implementing this solution to our customers.

I was able to evaluate F5 and Radware.

My rating for this solution is ten out of ten. I think it is the best product ever.

My recommendation is for customers here in Mexico to try it. I feel it is the best solution in the market, at least here in Mexico. My message to customers here is to try it and they'll never be disappointed with this magic box.

In our experience, Loadbalancer.org is best suited for small businesses looking to balance their website. They don't require HA, DR, or anything else.

Loadbalancer.org is less complex than Citrix. In some cases, our customers do not have an engineer on staff who can support this device.

These customers have a large number of Linux engineers but don't have the money. We suggested using Loadbalancer.org and other open-source tools. Many customers are of different sizes and have different budgets.

Loadbalancer.org has everything that is needed.

The price could be reduced. 

Loadbalancer.org's complexity could be reduced.

I last used Loadbalancer.org three years ago, but I deploy this solution for our clients.

I am also working with F5, Kemp, Barracuda, Cisco, and NGINX.

The last time that I used Barracuda was three to five years ago.

We used F5 Big-IP with some customers and deployed it to others.

It is easy to deploy Loadbalancer.org.

Loadbalancer.org is an open-source solution, with additional costs, however, in some cases, the price remains the same. It is dependent on the customer and what discounts F5 has given.

Loadbalancer.org is based on open-source products, but it requires money for support and other activities.

I would recommend this solution for small businesses with limited resources and do not have complicated requirements.

I would rate Loadbalancer.org an eight out of ten.