We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, Fortinet FortiADC, and HAProxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5, Citrix, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)."Its flexibility, agility, and robustness are the most valuable. Its management and implementation are also quite easy."
"The maintenance of the solution is not complex."
"One feature that works really well is the SSL VPN. It's very easy to set up and you can go very granular with it. You can define what user groups get what kind of access and the management overhead is very low."
"The best feature of Citrix is its track record of stability in its features."
"The load balancing feature and the fact that you can do context switching in the WAF are the most valuable. We majorly use it for load balancing, but we also use it for context switching in the WAF. It is also robust and very easy to work with and manage."
"Enables a Web service that offers persistent client-server connections, IP restriction, URL rewrite (such as remove "/assets/" path from client-side URL path), and cache for CSS or JS files... You can easily use the GUI to set up all these requirements on the same network device within 20-30 minutes. (If you do the same steps on CLI, it might take less time.)"
"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 solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature."
"The solution provides high-level services such as availability, redundancy, and load balancing between servers."
"Fortinet FortiADC is a good product because each and every piece of content is monitored by it."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL offloading capacity."
"The main feature that we use is GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing). GSLB makes the customer's network more reliable by scaling applications across multiple datacenters. GSLB as a disaster recovery solution can direct traffic based on site availability."
"It's a good product because it supports all the features that ADC solutions in the market can support, like F5 solutions, for example, such as the LTM of F5."
"The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily."
"I am impressed with the product's load-balancing feature."
"The product has flexible and interesting licensing options."
"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"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."
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"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."
"Advanced traffic rules, including stick tables and ACLs, which allow me to shape traffic while it's load balanced."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB-algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."
"The tool needs to add a feature where we can access the network policy access manager."
"I feel that Citrix NetScaler's customer support needs to improve."
"The technical support could be improved. They do not respond or assist customers in a timely manner."
"Development team's response time could be better."
"The solution should be able to scale more effectively than it does."
"Should offer more flexible cost-effective licensing for small to medium sized organizations."
"Maybe creating policies with simple regular expressions."
"There is a mismatch between the number of features they are offering and the device capacity on how much it can handle."
"The product's stability for VMs could be better."
"Issues with SSL and encrypted traffic."
"It would be good if they built in a fully functional web application firewall."
"Setup could be easier. The company's homework is to redesign those menus to configure with the smallest number of steps."
"Fortinet has some drawbacks, and it can be a bit challenging to scale."
"I had a terrible experience with Fortinet support. I only used support once when I bought the solution. I got no response for two days. However, I believe that it's no longer the case. Fortinet solutions have problems when they're launched. For example, we had issues with Fortinet's authenticator when it came out. We also had trouble with FortiNAC in the beginning."
"Technical support and documentation could both be improved."
"The product does not have any new technologies."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."
"The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs."
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
"HAProxy is very weak in the logging and monitoring part and requires improvement."
"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."
"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."
