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)."My customers have told me that the performance of this solution is good."
"The solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature."
"I would say the rewriting and redirection functions are must-have's for us."
"The solution improves security performance."
"NetScaler Gateway: Why? Availability/Security: We delivered more than 200 applications thru Xenapp. This feature give us the possibility to deliver the applications anywhere. Currently, 30% of access is made through our NetScaler Gateway (Internet connections)."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"One of its most valuable features is fundamental load balancing, supporting both basic load balancing and database teams."
"The most valuable feature is the content switching."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"Tech support is super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue."
"Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development."
"The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."
"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"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."
"We use it as a load balancer for our application servers."
"I can simplify configurations of many internal services (e.g. Web server configs) by moving some elements (like SSL) to HAProxy. I can also disable additional applications, like Varnish, by moving traffic shaping configurations to HAProxy."
"We now get notifications when pool members go down, and we eliminate our downtime by not sending traffic to downed pool members."
"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."
"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."
"It's pretty much a Swiss Army knife for managing all the load balancing techniques."
"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."
"The SSL Layer 7 load balancing is valuable."
"It does what it’s supposed to do which is balancing an important intranet site we are using, so if one server dies, the second becomes active straight away."
"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."
"Technical support sometimes takes a little longer because of the multilevel ticket priority."
"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."
"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."
"Technical support could be improved."
"Does not include security. A web application firewall would be a nice addition."
"We would like to see some fairly large scale improvement in the configuration process for this solution."
"I feel that Citrix NetScaler's customer support needs to improve."
"The product does not have any new technologies."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"It needs proper HTTP/2 support."
"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."
"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 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)."
"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."
"Maybe HAProxy could be more modular."
"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."
"I would like it if Loadbalancer had the ability to make rules for specific shared bots."
"The configuration is somewhat complicated. Someone who does not know the solution may find this challenging."
"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."
"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."
"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."
