We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), and NGINX Plus 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 web application firewalling component is a powerful feature."
"The solution is easy to work with and manage."
"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."
"The program is easy to install and to set up."
"This solution allows the user to easily scale out application delivery, and provides secure remote access."
"Compared to other solutions, Citrix ADC is much more robust in terms of the native integration to cloud platforms. It is far more robust from an operational point of view as well."
"Load balancing, cache redirection, content switching, all connected with traffic management."
"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."
"I like that F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a product that comes with valuable features, but what stands out from all features is load balancing."
"This is a solution that does what it's supposed to do at the price point."
"Stable and scalable network traffic management solution for applications. It has good performance."
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) improves the resilience and quality of the application itself, the speed and the user experience for the application. The data that the users need from the application is actually acquired faster. So, it provides faster data acquisition."
"In my team, we work in a very agile environment and the solutions from BIG-IP, including BIG-IP WAF, suit us well when developing and serving our applications."
"BIG-IP can do anything. It's like a Swiss Army knife."
"Users can see a remarkable performance difference from a qualitative sense."
"The most valuable feature I found is iRules."
"With NGINX, I appreciate its ability to route traffic geographically."
"Its versatility and capabilities make it invaluable for implementing patches and fixes when necessary."
"The load balancing module, which is equivalent to LTM, is the focus of the PSE. So far, the features of both are identical. I believe NGINX has more features for securing these services, but in terms of load balancing, both are massive solutions."
"The most valuable features are the gateway and the ability to publish to sites."
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"When you use NGINX, you have more options and power."
"It's lightweight software that can handle heavy loads efficiently."
"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."
"Currently, the support team's responsiveness is lacking, and the technical personnel on calls often seem unfamiliar with the issues or inadequately trained."
"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."
"The technical support could be better. Whenever I contacted support, I rarely got the solution that we needed. And most of the time, I finished fixing the problem by looking on the internet or by finding documents about the problem on Google."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It was challenging explaining to customers that it's no longer NetScaler but ADC, and now it's not just ADC but also the rebranding from NetScaler."
"Quality assurance could improve by ironing out security vulnerabilities before releasing upgrades."
"We need best-practice information. They have something called DevCentral and a blog. But we want something from F5 itself regarding how to tackle the false-positive configurations. If you go into detail with so many configurations it will find so many false positives from the moment it is enabled that it will quickly impact your applications, and it will not work."
"The initial setup can take a long time."
"For a future release, I would like to see more features in the cloud."
"They could improve the product's ease of use. There is some confusion how to operate it."
"The license terms for "non-commercial" will be a challenge for us."
"Improvements should enable customers to build a tailor-made solution in the future through a service portal."
"I would like to see improvement in the manageability and easier setup."
"To improve the product, they could add more load balancing solutions in Kubernetes."
"The biggest room for improvement would be to allow NGINX Core machines to cluster for memory zones in some way with a plug and play module. "
"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."
"The solution's GUI is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"The scaling should be built into the software rather than configured from an outside source."
"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."
"They should do in the open source version of what they did to Advanced HTTP, TCP, and UDP load balancing."
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