We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, HAProxy, and Radware Alteon based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Citrix, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)."This solution increases the backend network service performance, which is one of the things that we like the most."
"Its customer support service is good."
"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."
"Content Switching provides flexibility for routing traffic as desired to designated real servers. It also provides good geo capabilities through its GSLB feature."
"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."
"It's very easy to configure."
"What I like most about Citrix NetScaler is its stability, and I didn't see a lot of issues with it."
"I can turn on features without actually owning a license. I can test them out, I can use them for a while, and then I can be licensed up. That's awesome. I don't have to have a license immediately before I can start to deploy things rapidly, rapid deployment is a plus."
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"The features I find valuable in this solution are session control which automatically disconnects users that forget to log off, and the ability to write rules to either allow or block certain file requests."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is that it works for my use case of application load balancing. I'm using it for PeerSense, and it's easy enough for PeerSense."
"The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice."
"Performance configuration options with threads, processes, and core stickiness are very valuable."
"HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime."
"HAProxy's TCP load balancer is excellent and super stable."
"The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something."
"A user-friendly and reasonably priced solution."
"Radware has been characterized by being extremely robust. This gives us the confidence to offer our users a continuous service."
"I like the ADC feature and the global certificate feature."
"The integrated application protection provided by Alteon is very good. It really helps to avoid false positives in some cases. It provides important granularity to avoid a situation in which security or cybersecurity scenarios escape us."
"The command line interface is simple and very user-friendly."
"The best part is that we are able to manage it easily. It is easy to manage and easy to integrate with third-party applications."
"It is easy to expand. Our clients are enterprise-size."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its stability. During the time that I have been using it, it has not undergone a service failure... And with the integrated application protection, we have not suffered from attacks anymore."
"The solution can improve their support and send tickets directly to a Citrix ADC engineer in order to avoid having to escalate each support call."
"Its GUI should be improved. Its CLI is powerful, but GUI needs more features."
"The product provides some templates to integrate with applications like MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, SAP Enterprise Portal, and others. However, the last update for these templates was 2013 (lots of applications are running on versions newer then 2013)."
"We would like to see some fairly large scale improvement in the configuration process for this solution."
"Technical support sometimes takes a little longer because of the multilevel ticket priority."
"The main areas for improvement would be around documentation and support. If a feature can be used in two or three ways, show that feature being used in all of those ways. Documentation seems to only cover the primary use case and leaves you to either run through trial and error or consult the user community. In terms of support, I have never actually had them solve any of my issues. I have always solved them myself and then provided the resolution to support."
"An area for improvement would be the difficulty in finding information about standard licensing costs over the internet. They should provide some reference prices on the net to be quickly referred to."
"There are some features which are missing."
"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."
"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."
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"HAProxy could do with some good combination integrations."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
"The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is."
"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"Performance could be improved."
"We recently had a problem with the tables Obsolete ARP which was observed by the support team. It would be good to diagnose and solve this problem with a patch since it is not documented that it will be solved in later updates."
"We’d like the solution to include more security features in the standard license."
"Scalability should be based on customer requirements."
"I would like for the load balancing to work with premier and the cloud, a mix of premium and cloud."
"We are in the process of updating our version of the solution, so judging what should be improved is difficult. But in some cases, the visualization takes a while, especially for mapping issues."
"I would like the solution to display and help visualize the reference map more easily. I would also like to better understand where queries come from and know which users are consulting the application, along with which app."
"The user interface can be improved."
