We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, HAProxy, 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)."The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN."
"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."
"SSL Offload"
"The solution was very easy to deploy."
"One of its most valuable features is fundamental load balancing, supporting both basic load balancing and database teams."
"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.)"
"I like app flows and custom flows. They integrate with multiple flows."
"The best feature of Citrix is its track record of stability in its features."
"I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime."
"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."
"Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature."
"It reduced the load on our main load balancers."
"It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"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."
"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"Load balancing helps us distribute both incoming and outgoing data loads evenly among the servers, preventing overload on a single server."
"With basic network knowledge, our required system functionality can be configured and maintained."
"For now, it's stable."
"It helps us to route the traffic to the available servers. If we didn't have Loadbalancer we would fail to set the end-user and it would cause a failure in the cluster."
"Most important for us that it makes sure that the load is distributed and that we always have access to the end servers."
"Existing customers are trying to migrate from the physical F5 load balancer to the AVI load balancer because it is scalable and easily managed."
"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."
"We can more easily set up a test environment, because you can easily configure your forms. It makes it more flexible for us, to convert our test environment to a production environment, without having to change DNSs on the outside. You just configure the forms on the inside. So without changing the actual endpoint for the end user, we can create completely different networks in the background."
"I think there is always room for improvement in this type of solutions. For example, I think the GUI should be easy to understand."
"Native integration needs to be improved. You cannot build ISE codes natively. For DevOps, integration would be very helpful because it would be a lot simpler from an operational standpoint."
"Citrix ADC is a complex product, and it takes time to understand these things. But the documentation is poor, and the deployment is difficult. Integration could also be better because what I find is that you cannot easily integrate the panel in the second sector. What I have found is that in the last index, there is a limitation when getting validated. Technical support could also be better."
"The GUI should be improved."
"It does not have a sandbox cloud service and antivirus. It should have on-prem or cloud sandboxing and antivirus."
"The licensing model and technical support of the solution could be improved."
"The technical support could be improved. They do not respond or assist customers in a timely manner."
"Currently, the support team's responsiveness is lacking, and the technical personnel on calls often seem unfamiliar with the issues or inadequately trained."
"The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs."
"Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime."
"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."
"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 HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"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."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"The web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible)."
"Loadbalancer.org's complexity could be reduced."
"If I have to say something, I suppose they could add an automated configuration backup to an FTP location (or something similar) so you don’t have to manually do it. I don’t see this as a problem, of course, as the configuration rarely changes and we only need one backup, but maybe for other users that feature would be handy."
"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."
"I'd like to see scalability improved; it can be costly."
"The configuration is somewhat complicated. Someone who does not know the solution may find this challenging."
"Originally we had some stability issues with it, so they replaced it with a new box and it's fine."
"They're mostly designed to balance a particular type of traffic. I wanted to load balance DNS, and they just don't do it the way that we wanted to. So they're not used as DNS load balancers."
"I would like a notification when a new version of the software is available. They told me to sign up for their newsletter, but I have not received any notification for a newer software version."
