We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), 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)."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 is the best product out there."
"Global load balancing between data centers."
"For desktop application management, I recommend the NetScaler edition. This product is like a Swiss army knife. Citrix NetScaler ADC supports the education front-end."
"The most valuable features are the VDA Delivery, Gateway Fort, and the load balancing."
"Scalability is great. One of the best features of NetScaler is that it can scale out."
"What I like most about Citrix NetScaler is its stability, and I didn't see a lot of issues with it."
"It is a complete solution for those looking for an all-in-one."
"I think F5's tech support may be better than Citrix's because they mainly focus on the ADC product, but Citrix support covers Hypervisor, XenMobile, FAS, and ADC. And from my experience, sometimes, we face some issues that Citrix cannot handle."
"The most valuable feature is being able to manipulate the iRules, so you can send traffic to different avenues."
"Great load balancing."
"Where we are finding the AWS version helpful is when we are trying to scale up new environments. AWS Marketplace helps here a lot."
"LTM."
"The solution's stability is pretty good."
"The solution is robust and reliable."
"If I were to choose one key feature in particular, perhaps it would be the iRule feature. It’s a really versatile tool."
"For now, it's stable."
"The load balancers have an easy installation and a relatively simple, easy user interface to use."
"It does what it’s supposed to do which is balancing an important intranet site we are using, so if one server dies, the second becomes active straight away."
"The performance is good."
"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."
"Loadbalancer.org is less complex than Citrix."
"The SSL Layer 7 load balancing is valuable."
"Most important for us that it makes sure that the load is distributed and that we always have access to the end servers."
"The SLB could be better, and they should improve it."
"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."
"I feel that Citrix NetScaler's customer support needs to improve."
"I would like to see support for scripting, like "iRule", which gives you the option to implement any configuration which is not available out of the box."
"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)."
"Technical support could be improved."
"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."
"Reducing the overhead required for AppFlow data collection, specifically for HDX Insight, would be a huge improvement."
"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."
"Based on my experience using F5 and by only taking into consideration the last seven years, I have found that the reporting mechanism is bad."
"Security and Reporting."
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager could improve by having an FNI feature for a single source to multi-domain load balancing."
"The UI could be improved."
"If they made it easier for engineers to get F5 training then it would be better."
"Logging is a bit of a problem. Logging and monitoring are only in plain text. You have to search and you have to know what you are searching for to find anything. So of course, monitoring and getting alerts for abnormal situations is hard. There are no tools for monitoring and alerts"
"The product is expensive."
"Originally we had some stability issues with it, so they replaced it with a new box and it's fine."
"Compared to the physical products, the solution's throughput is a little less."
"The interface from Loadbalancer.org should be improved."
"It doesn't have the bonding capability feature."
"There are many features you can set in the backend of Loadbalancer. They should simplify the configuration. The administrator should be able to configure it more simply. How it is now, you can only configure it if you have a lot of experience."
"The configuration is somewhat complicated. Someone who does not know the solution may find this challenging."
"Possibly a more graphical overview page (with colors) to give a two second overview to see if everything is working fine."
"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."
More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Pricing and Cost Advice →
