We performed a comparison between Citrix NetScaler, Loadbalancer.org, 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)."High availability, performance, and security are the main pillars. It enhances the security for accessing the applications."
"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."
"It is simple for both IT specialists and customers."
"It has helped us to increase the resiliency of the application and the performance."
"SSL Offload"
"I like app flows and custom flows. They integrate with multiple flows."
"One of the most beneficial features for application delivery is its integration with Citrix Storefront, facilitating user logins and ensuring continuity during data center outages."
"This solution increases the backend network service performance, which is one of the things that we like the most."
"We have about 30,000 connections going through at any one time and it's fine, it doesn't seem to sweat. It doesn't get overloaded."
"With basic network knowledge, our required system functionality can be configured and maintained."
"The load balancers have an easy installation and a relatively simple, easy user interface to use."
"Existing customers are trying to migrate from the physical F5 load balancer to the AVI load balancer because it is scalable and easily managed."
"Load balancing helps us distribute both incoming and outgoing data loads evenly among the servers, preventing overload on a single server."
"The performance is good."
"For now, it's stable."
"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."
"Zero Downtime has always been a strength in recommending infrastructure web services. NGINX allows me to execute such infrastructure with less complications and the ability to switch from server to server easily."
"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."
"Nginx is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles."
"Using NGINX Plus for web traffic distribution is fantastic. It offers performance similar to physical load balancers but with added flexibility."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is simple to configure."
"I find the solution’s community support and documentation most valuable. Compared to HAProxy, have found a lot of documentation and community support on Quora. If you would be asking me as a developer whether to choose this product, I would recommend this since it has good community support, documentation, and signature updates. The configuration of HAProxy is also very tedious. However, NGINX’s configuration is very simple."
"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 product is lightweight and fast."
"Technical support could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see multifactor authentication added to this solution to improve the security."
"Quality assurance could improve by ironing out security vulnerabilities before releasing upgrades."
"The SLB could be better, and they should improve it."
"Getting to use some of the advanced tools, even with the assistance of Citrix support, can be challenging."
"We are looking for some in-depth monitoring and analytics and more information that Citrix Director doesn't provide. ControlUp has insights that not only give you an overview but also allow you to do some drill-down troubleshooting for what's going on in your environment. We are looking for some more analytical and monitoring data to be able to monitor the environment better, not only from an application standpoint but also from the standpoint of the infrastructure to everything it sits on. They can provide more data to the administrators about what's going on within the application. They can provide data not only on the application side but also about what the application sits on. They're making strides with Citrix Analytics in regards to that."
"The configuration is somewhat complicated. Someone who does not know the solution may find this challenging."
"We could enhance the security aspects of the load balancer."
"You can run into an issue when one engineer passes the case over to another engineer after their shift and they don't know what the first engineer worked on up to that point."
"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."
"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."
"It would be great if there was a way to gain access to the graphing data, to create custom reports. If we had a way to use the graphing data, we could use it to present certain information to our client, such as the uptime status for their service."
"I'd like to see scalability improved; it can be costly."
"The automatic refresh of the System Overview webpage: It sometimes has an extra webpage reload (after a change) before you see it is executed. This can be confusing."
"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."
"The center management system could be improved."
"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."
"Make modules easier to enable or disable. The beauty and ugly side of the NGINX modules is you have to know how to compile the module. For beginners or non-very technical aspirant(s) going for NGINX, they have to learn how to compile the modules."
"The solution needs to be easier to setup and deploy."
"If NGINX brings some features for health check in the open source version, it would be better. "
"The solution must improve its performance."
