We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, HAProxy, 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 most valuable feature is load balancing."
"The web application firewall is one feature I found valuable in the solution."
"We appreciate that this solution facilitates our access to Citrix internet."
"My clients use it for load balancing."
"High availability, performance, and security are the main pillars. It enhances the security for accessing the applications."
"I like the ease of use. It's easy to manage. I also like it's ease of use with virtualization technologies with applications."
"I find all of it to be valuable, because of the flexibility that is built into this product."
"It is the best product out there."
"Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development."
"The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used."
"HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment"
"It solves a problem for me where I can build files, not based on the health of the check, but rather the speed of the check."
"I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring."
"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."
"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."
"Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind."
"Nginx is simple to configure, very stable in a highly utilized environment and very modular, allowing DevOps to create it's own modules for interactive use with Nginx."
"When you use NGINX, you have more options and power."
"Nginx is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles."
"Application Gateway with application-level firewall tool and load distributor and balancer (also serves for A/B testing)."
"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."
"NGINX Plus' most valuable feature is the ingress controller."
"Using NGINX Plus for web traffic distribution is fantastic. It offers performance similar to physical load balancers but with added flexibility."
"The robust software architecture allows for it to be scalable and very stable."
"Finding relevant documentation for learning NetScaler can be challenging, especially for beginners who prefer a web interface over command-line interfaces."
"Citrix should improve the documentation. It is not really clear how to set up many features to our advantage. When we setup Citrix NetScaler ADC, we have to figure it out by ourselves without a lot of documentation."
"We face challenges with the solution's firmware upgrades frequently."
"Manageability and adaptability can also be challenging for end customers."
"The solution should be able to scale more effectively than it does."
"There is room for improvement regarding the pricing policy for Citrix offices."
"The solution is a bit more expensive than some of the available solutions in this region. One solution in particular that I noticed was cheaper was Kemp."
"Its GUI should be improved. Its CLI is powerful, but GUI needs more features."
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
"The visibility could be improved."
"The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic."
"There are three main areas to improve: 1) Make remote management more modern by adding API. 2) Propose a general HA solution for HAProxy (no I'm using keepalived for this). 3) Thread option should be a bit more stable."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"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."
"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."
"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."
"I would like it to have a more user-friendly graphical interface."
"If NGINX brings some features for health check in the open source version, it would be better. "
"The user interface could be improved."
"The solution must improve its performance."
"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."
"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."
"Improvement needed in NGINX Plus could focus on optimizing memory usage for users."
"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."
