We performed a comparison between A10 Networks Thunder ADC, Citrix NetScaler, and Loadbalancer.org based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Citrix, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)."The ease of use is very good. It's very robust. It just sits and works."
"We have two appliances and I'm able to move my application from one appliance to another. I don't have to move my whole A10 to be active on the other side or to be passive on the other side. If an application is having a problem, I can just move it using a command."
"We do have the option of creating virtual chassis, so that gives it a bit more security. If we find an application which is not going to play well in the main pool, we can easily create a virtual chassis and have that application in that virtual chassis. With the virtual chassis we can also create system partitions and have a test system for test applications, and have the others elsewhere."
"Compared to F5, which I used about six years ago, the A10 is much easier when routing. You don't have to use the wildcard bits to route it between the different segments. It's much less troublesome to configure."
"The DNS application firewall and load balancing are very valuable."
"It is very useful to have a simple dashboard where you can login and look into what your traffic patterns are, then look and see what times of day you're experiencing the heaviest traffic. You can quickly identify if you are possibly having a security issue or security breach. It makes it very easy to use the box."
"The most valuable features in A10 Networks Thunder ADC are the ease of configuration, user-friendliness, and simplicity to sell to customers."
"Feature-wise, A10 Networks Thunder ADC is better for troubleshooting...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"This solution increases the backend network service performance, which is one of the things that we like the most."
"Its flexibility, agility, and robustness are the most valuable. Its management and implementation are also quite easy."
"Very stable."
"Unified Gateway allows me to provide secure external access to applications for suppliers and customers while requiring Multi-Factor Authentication."
"The GSLB feature allows us to move services between data centers. We can do this in either a planned or unplanned manner. We have experienced service provider outages at our primary data center and GSLB will kick in to automatically modify DNS records to point to a secondary data center (active/passive). We also make use of GeoIP information to point clients to the closest data center for accessing applications."
"Most of the functions are user-friendly and great."
"HTTP analysis and action. We have a lot of custom web applications that sometimes require custom header insertions. Some of these custom apps are external and, via the content switching, we can use one IP and leverage various back-end web app servers."
"The most valuable features are the VDA Delivery, Gateway Fort, and the load balancing."
"For now, it's stable."
"Loadbalancer.org is less complex than Citrix."
"I found scalability in Loadbalancer.org valuable."
"The features I find valuable in this solution are the ease of managing the logs on the WAFs, the ease to identify break-in attempts into the network, the front-end firewall, and a more specific firewall."
"It helps us to route the traffic to the available servers. If we didn't have Loadbalancer we would fail to set the end-user and it would cause a failure in the cluster."
"Load balancing helps us distribute both incoming and outgoing data loads evenly among the servers, preventing overload on a single server."
"The SSL Layer 7 load balancing is valuable."
"It's pretty much a Swiss Army knife for managing all the load balancing techniques."
"We are starting to do a lot with containers and how the solution hooks into Kubernetes that we haven't explored. I'm hoping that they have a lot of hooks into Kubernetes. That would be the part for improvement: Marketing use cases with containers."
"The costs can be quite high."
"It scaled well for our numbers, up to 3 million subscribers for our most crowded region but I would like to see the same scalability numbers for the virtualized version as well."
"When it comes to support, there is always room for improvement. First call resolution is not always there for urgent issues. The first call resolution is something that could be improved upon."
"The tool's load-balancing feature should improve."
"The solution does logging, but the logging capacity is really small. Because we have a bunch of traffic here, we usually get a logging-side warning that "This many logs were lost because of the heavy traffic." If the logging was better, that would be very good."
"Traffic flow issues are very difficult, as there's no means for us to analyze the traffic coming in or out of the appliance without technical support."
"They need to make the user interface (GUI) a bit more usable and intuitive. Some features can be a little difficult to find at times. Sometimes, the workflow in the GUI doesn't match the workflow of an actual workflow. E.g., if I want to create a load balancer application, sometimes you've got to do things a bit out of order in the GUI in order to make it work right."
"Scripting and writing expressions need to be improved by putting logic behind the rules and improve policies involving some of the scripting part, which is a tedious task to do."
"Does not include security. A web application firewall would be a nice addition."
"Technical support sometimes takes a little longer because of the multilevel ticket priority."
"Citrix NetScaler has been recently acquired by another company and the support has been negatively impacted, the solution is at its end of life. The support for the solution could improve. The sales team needs to be improved."
"Citrix ADC can be really complex. It isn't very simple like some other appliances that I've worked with. You need a lot of skill and experience to manage it. I'm not talking about a year or two. You need at least four years to understand it very well. It is not that easy to learn. They should make it a lot simpler for users to understand the management of it. They can also provide some additional training. The material they have on the site is not sufficient enough for you to understand how to manage it. Their training is expensive, and not everyone has the funds and experience for it. Citrix isn't very popular around these parts of the world. So, it can use some more marketing, sales, enlightenment, and advertisement. These could bring more market for them. Basically, there are just a few companies that really go for Citrix. Most of the companies go for VMware because they marketed themselves more than Citrix. There isn't much difference between Citrix and VMware. VMware is a little more robust than Citrix. Citrix has focused more on desktops rather than server virtualization, and that's the advantage VMware has over Citrix. Citrix also needs to educate and inform users about the infrastructure that is supported with a version. Currently, if the customers don't look at the datasheet, they might miss this important information."
"The customization has always been a key area where some improvements are required. In the beginning, everything was for customizing the outer shell of it. You had to use the command-based utility and you had to do a lot of manual work. They have improved it a little bit and now there are some GUI-based functionalities that can be used. However, more can be done that doesn't require a lot of intervention. Right now there are some features, there are some customizations that can be done, but it's still very tedious, very cumbersome, a lot of work. So that could be simplified."
"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."
"The solution should be able to scale more effectively than it does."
"I would like it if Loadbalancer had the ability to make rules for specific shared bots."
"Compared to the physical products, the solution's throughput is a little less."
"Possibly a more graphical overview page (with colors) to give a two second overview to see if everything is working fine."
"Originally we had some stability issues with it, so they replaced it with a new box and it's fine."
"It would be great if there was a way to gain access to the graphing data, to create custom reports. If we had a way to use the graphing data, we could use it to present certain information to our client, such as the uptime status for their service."
"An area for improvement in Loadbalancer.org is that sometimes it works fine, but sometimes, it has issues. The setup for Loadbalancer.org is also complex, so that's another area for improvement."
"The automatic refresh of the System Overview webpage: It sometimes has an extra webpage reload (after a change) before you see it is executed. This can be confusing."
"You can run into an issue when one engineer passes the case over to another engineer after their shift and they don't know what the first engineer worked on up to that point."
