We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler and HAProxy 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."It is simple for both IT specialists and customers."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is its load balancing."
"The most valuable feature of Citrix ADC is its ease of use."
"What I like most about Citrix NetScaler is its stability, and I didn't see a lot of issues with it."
"For NetScaler, our major use cases are database load balancing, PowerVPN VPN access gateway, WAF (Web Application Firewall), and content switching."
"It is the best product out there."
"I found that the GUI was very easy to to navigate. If you were looking for something, it was fairly easy to find. There's a lot of third-party documentation and information available online as well."
"I like app flows and custom flows. They integrate with multiple flows."
"The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions."
"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."
"Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development."
"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"The security is okay, but the monitoring and reporting need improvement."
"It can be difficult to setup."
"In every release - and it doesn't matter if it's a minor release or a major release - they keep moving things around and they keep changing the mechanism. So certain things can work in one version one way, and everything works really well, then when you upgrade it to the next version, it breaks everything because they have a new way of doing it."
"Improvements are needed to address the issue of machines becoming unregistered, ensuring stability for end users. Troubleshooting with Citrix support can be challenging, so clearer diagnostics would be beneficial. As for global server load balancing, it works well on-premises, depending on user volume and service stability. Overall, it's satisfactory for us."
"The vendor provides frequent patches, however, the security of the website has room for improvement."
"We are looking for some in-depth monitoring and analytics and more information that Citrix Director doesn't provide. ControlUp has insights that not only give you an overview but also allow you to do some drill-down troubleshooting for what's going on in your environment. We are looking for some more analytical and monitoring data to be able to monitor the environment better, not only from an application standpoint but also from the standpoint of the infrastructure to everything it sits on. They can provide more data to the administrators about what's going on within the application. They can provide data not only on the application side but also about what the application sits on. They're making strides with Citrix Analytics in regards to that."
"The solution could be more secure."
"Some of our customers have questioned the security of this solution lately, wondering whether it is safe or not, so enhancements in this respect would be good."
"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."
"HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets."
"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."
"There are three main areas to improve: 1) Make remote management more modern by adding API. 2) Propose a general HA solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this). 3) Thread option should be a bit more stable."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source."
"I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading. Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available."
"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."
Citrix NetScaler is ranked 2nd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 85 reviews while HAProxy is ranked 3rd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 41 reviews. Citrix NetScaler is rated 8.4, while HAProxy is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Citrix NetScaler writes "Optimizing application delivery and ensuring robust network performance with its excellent stability and comprehensive load-balancing capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Offers good integration capabilities but needs to improve the monitoring part". Citrix NetScaler is most compared with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Fortinet FortiADC, Loadbalancer.org and A10 Networks Thunder ADC, whereas HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Envoy. See our Citrix NetScaler vs. HAProxy report.
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