Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Avi Networks Software Load Balancer and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution has simplified our network infrastructure management.""Its visibility and login mechanism are the best parts. In addition to the great visibility it has a great dashboard and an easy to configure graphic user interface, a beautiful GUI.""The WAF - the web application firewall itself - is great.""The most valuable feature of the solution for my organization is its UI since it allows us to see the clusters while providing a very specific and good overall understanding.""The friendly user interface is valuable.""What's most valuable in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its deployment capability, the ability to deploy in a dispersed service, with the service engines that can disperse and have a single control plane that can control the load balancing services across any available platform, wherever needed. The analytics of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer and flexibility of deployment are its most valuable features and the reasons why many people buy it.""The interface and software features are the most valuable aspects of this solution.""The solution is stable."

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"The stability is excellent.""What we like best about this solution is its stability. It is extremely stable.""I have found F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to be stable.""One of the best features of the solution is the operating system.""The solution has good load balancing capabilities.""It is an easy way to build application policies (graphical).""The solution could improve the ease of use, the management could be simplified. Other solutions are easier to use.""It can determine if the system is going down, then route the traffic somewhere else."

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Cons
"Avi Networks Software Load Balancer needs to improve its documentation.""The network analytics and monitoring features are not effective.""It doesn't match the development structure or user community of our existing product. It pales in comparison to that.""In terms of improvement, the pricing and documentation need improvement. We have had problems getting the documents.""I did not go with it because their APM module is a different product altogether. It's a common thing that companies do. They sell something and then they add on top of it as a different product. It is a type of marketing strategy. But when it comes to the overall management, it takes a lot of time to really look into it.""IDS and IPS sites need to be more progressive.""The initial setup is a bit complex.""One struggle with Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its integration with other VMware products. Integration could be improved in the solution so that you have a more unified control plane with it and other data center security and networking products that VMware sells. There has been a bit of a lag on the roadmap of new features that have come out there recently, but better interoperability with the hyperscale environments such as the AWS, Azure, GCPs of the world, and simpler deployment and interoperability with those existing tools, are areas that are receiving attention and could use additional attention today. These are the areas for improvement in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer."

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"The user experience for dashboards and reports can be improved. They should make dashboards and the reporting system easier for users. They need to add more reports to the dashboard. Currently, for complicated reports, I have to do the customization. It should have more integration with network firewalls to be able to gather all the information required for traffic management.""Its GUI could be a bit better. Other than that, it's already pretty good. We don't use it in a high-performance environment. So, we don't really care so much about too many features.""The ASM administration is quite complex. The topic itself is pretty complex, so it is not easy to provide a nice, clean interface. There are a lot of references and dependencies in-between the different subareas.""Right now, there are a lot of products within F5's portfolio. They acquired a couple of companies like NGINX and Volterra. Some features and technologies overlapped when this acquisition occurred. They need to refine it and come up with a single, proper solution. F5 should focus more on zero trust network access (ZTNA).They should be more focused on that framework because the industry is moving towards that. Everyone is talking about SASE and zero trust.""The user interface of F5 BIG-IP LTM is old and could improve.""The solution could improve the documentation.""Currently, the product offers everything we need. I can't recall any features that may be lacking.""I'm not very sure about the security with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). We have our own private data center, but we are going to migrate our private data center into the Azure cloud environment. Security will then be a major concern when we migrate our own whole infrastructure to the public cloud."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "With Avi Networks, you can buy a 10-Gig license and, if your primary data center goes down, in the flick of a switch you can move that license to your backup data center and it will generate the traffic... there are a lot of cost-effective measures."
  • "The licensing costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer are really variable. The product can be sold from a bandwidth utilization perspective. It can be sold from a per CPU perspective, depending on if you're looking at on-premises or hyperscale environments. Licensing costs vary quite a bit if you're familiar with the AWS Calculator, where you can see that it can widely vary per licensing model. On a scale of one to five, with one being not very good value for the money and five being great, I would rate the pricing for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer a five because its pricing is extremely competitive. Not all features are included with the license, for example, there's single licensing."
  • "I rate the solution price a four to five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high, since it is an affordable tool."
  • "The tool is expensive."
  • More Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Though functionality is high, its cost can be considered slightly higher than its competitors​."
  • "The licensing pricing seems relatively easy enough to get your head around. I would advise anyone to ensure that you have a conversation with an F5 consultant before purchasing, as you would with most products."
  • "Take a look at the modules that you are going to use. Look into the best bundles for them."
  • "The only area that has room for improvement would be pricing, so its competitors do not have a say."
  • "If your IT budget is good, go for it."
  • "This product is costly from a licensing perspective considering its competitors."
  • "Check other vendors like Cisco, Citrix or A10 Networks. There are plenty in the market with which you can achieve same thing."
  • "Great product for the money. But they can get really expensive, so get what meets your needs."
  • More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The solution has simplified our network infrastructure management.
    Top Answer:The tool is expensive. It is not cheap. The product must be cheaper.
    Top Answer:The network analytics and monitoring features are not effective. The product does not provide deep troubleshooting features. The solution must provide public IP features. F5 provides such features.
    Top Answer:The support from F5 BIG-IP LTM is good.
    Top Answer:There are a few licensing options available for F5 BIG-IP LTM. You can have a perpetual license which is a lifetime license. You then only need to renew the support, if you choose to open a ticket… more »
    Top Answer:The pricing must be more flexible. We get billed for firewalls based on the usage. It will be helpful if the solution provides such flexibility.
    Ranking
    Views
    2,957
    Comparisons
    1,900
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    655
    Rating
    8.3
    Views
    10,290
    Comparisons
    8,518
    Reviews
    29
    Average Words per Review
    485
    Rating
    8.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Avi Software Load Balancer
    F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP
    Learn More
    Overview

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is an application delivery controller (ADC) platform. The solution provides scalable application delivery across any infrastructure and allows your organization to deliver multi-cloud application services, such as load balancing, autoscaling, application security, container networking, and web application firewall. It is designed with 100% software load balancing to ensure a fast and secure application experience. Additionally, Avi Networks Software Load Balancer offers elasticity and delivers intelligence across any environment.

    The Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is unique because

    • It can scale from 0 to 1 million SSL transactions per second in minutes.
    • It can achieve 90% faster provisioning and 50% lower TCO than a traditional appliance-based approach.

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Product Highlights

    • Troubleshoots application issues in less than a minute.
    • Alerts you of potential risks with SSL certificates and TLS versions used.
    • End-to-end timing for each transaction to help solve end-user experience issues.

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Features

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Automated application delivery
    • Seamless integration with the CI/CD
    • Built-in analytics
    • End-to-end visibility
    • Actionable insights
    • Security
    • “Network DVR”-like capability to record and replay specific transactions
    • Google-like search filters transactions based on device, location, errors, etc.

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Avi Networks Software Load Balancer. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Multi-cloud application services: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer provides consistent, enterprise-grade application services, including load balancing, WAF, and container networking across heterogeneous environments. The multi-cloud application services can be deployed on bare metal, VMs, or containers in any data center or public cloud environments.
    • Faster application provisioning: With this solution, you gain automation with 100% REST APIs and self-service like public cloud.
    • Better business decisions: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer uses analytics to deliver application insights and help you drive more intelligent decisions.
    • Containerized applications: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is a proven solution to deploy container-based workloads in production environments using Kubernetes/OpenShift/Tanzu clusters. It includes multi-cluster, multi-site support for containerized applications.
    • Lower TCO: The solution is 100% software, and does not require any proprietary hardware. In addition, because it offers on-demand autoscaling, there is no over-provisioning. Lastly, point-and-click application troubleshooting means there is no need for a black box.
    • Software-defined architecture: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is designed with a software-defined architecture with a centralized control plane (Avi Controller) and distributed data plane (Avi Service Engine). Because of this, elastic autoscaling is made easy.
    • Better end-user visibility: The solution gives you granular visibility into end-user experiences and server response in real time. It also empowers application owners with end-user stats to optimize and improve apps.
    • Application health score: Avi Networks Software Load Balancer summarizes analytics information into a helpful health score that provides a quick snapshot of the overall applications. The health score it provides is determined by server response time, resource usage, anomalous traffic, and security posture.

    F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.

    BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

    Sample Customers
    Palo Alto Networks, DGDean, Swisslos
    Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government9%
    Healthcare Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider20%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Media Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government9%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise68%
    Buyer's Guide
    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is ranked 9th in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 8 reviews while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is ranked 1st in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 116 reviews. Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is rated 8.2, while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer writes "Easy to set up and has good integration into the host environment but needs better third party integration". On the other hand, the top reviewer of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) writes "Helps deliver applications to users in a reliable, secure, and optimized way". Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is most compared with Citrix NetScaler, HAProxy, NGINX Plus, Fortinet FortiADC and Radware Alteon, whereas F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is most compared with Citrix NetScaler, Fortinet FortiADC, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus and Radware Alteon. See our Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report.

    See our list of best Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) vendors.

    We monitor all Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.