Citrix NetScaler Reviews

There are two major verticals for Citrix: VDI and NetScaler. For NetScaler, our major use cases are database load balancing, PowerVPN VPN access gateway, WAF (Web Application Firewall), and content switching. But most of them are for load balancing, access gateway, and VPN for NetScaler.

And for VDI, the major use cases are definitely securing the data and centralizing the entire infrastructure to the data center. Another major use case is publishing in-house applications for end-users who are working from home or from remote locations.

Our organization doesn't use it because we're very small. However, we have deployed the service for more than 10,000 users. Our smallest customer had 25 users, and the biggest customer had over 10,000 users.

We have eight people in the maintenance team for Citrix NetScaler, plus 24/7 customer support for day-to-day issues. They are managing multiple customers. Their expertise is at the level of RL1, three at RL2, one at L3, and one at L4.

For VDI, centralization, data protection, and data management are the most important features. As for NetScaler, its key features include a firewall, GSLB, load balancing, and an actual gateway. These are the four tiers of NetScalers.

Pricing is one area for improvement. It's on the higher side because NetScaler is a premium product used for over 70% of internet traffic worldwide. However, price is not the only concern. Manageability and adaptability can also be challenging for end customers, who may require the assistance of experts like us to deploy and manage the product effectively. Although this is good for us as partners, it can limit the product's appeal to customers who prioritize ease of use.

Moreover, having some GUI-based tools for log management and troubleshooting would be helpful and make it easier for customers to manage and troubleshoot their databases.

For the future release of Citrix NetScaler, I would like to see better pricing, as well as improved manageability and log management features.

Another thing is if a problem occurs, we have to rely on the central support system. We need to collect the log and send it back to support for analysis, and then Citrix support will provide the solution. It would be much easier to troubleshoot if something is handy, such as a web portal or a common platform where customers can upload logs and resolve some of the issues automatically.

I have been working with Citrix for over twelve or fifteen years, so I know everything about Citrix. We are using the latest update of this product.

It is a rock-solid solution, and I would rate it a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Previously, their support was great, especially two years ago. But these days, I'm seeing lots of slowness in providing solutions. The L1 support team is not ready, or the L2 team has a lot of work and is overburdened.

Therefore, sometimes they are very good and sometimes slow in responding, resulting in slow solution delivery.

Neutral

The deployment process is quite complex because it's a premium or tier-one product. It requires great knowledge and experience to make it easier. If you don't have the necessary knowledge and experience, you may struggle.

Moreover, the deployment process depends on the customer's requirements and priorities. If the customer is focusing on multiple options or use cases, it may take seven to ten days. But if it's a straightforward installation with only one solution, then two or three days is more than enough.

We are using both on-premises and cloud-based versions.

We have a good team of ten people in India, and we are expanding our partnerships all over the world. We have even received orders from the USA. We are focusing more and more on the interaction market and are not looking to hire any consultants or other sources. Our company is the SI (system Integrator) for the product.

It's a good investment tool. If your own organization or any other organization invests in this product, it will be useful for their product line. This product is robust and reliable, which helps customers a lot.

The cost of the product depends on the customer's requirements, so there is no fixed price. There are multiple licensing models. There are no additional costs for using this product. It comes with a support bundle, and the licensing is subscription-based. It means that you have to pay on a yearly basis.

Citrix can be quite expensive, and it can be challenging to qualify or close leads for 50 users or less than 100 users. Therefore, we are considering evaluating multiple products in parallel and finalizing one product we can pitch in our product line.

I would recommend using Citrix. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten because every product has room for improvement. If I rated it a nine, it means there's almost no room for improvement, which is not entirely true. So, eight is a fair rating.

Compared to other solutions, Citrix ADC is much more robust in terms of the native integration to cloud platforms. It is far more robust from an operational point of view as well.

Their support is also pretty good.

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.

The initial configuration needs to be rearchitected because of the limitations that are present with the cloud. It would be good if these limitations could be removed.

Improving the scalability would be really good as well.

I've worked with it for a few years.

It's primarily a cloud solution.

It is a stable solution.

The on-demand scalability options are not good.

The technical support from Citrix is good.

The initial setup is straightforward if your enterprise requirements are very simple. However, this is usually not the case, and then, the configurations are not straightforward.

It takes approximately two days to set it up. You would need a team of six, including engineers and senior tech leads.

There isn't much of a difference between the cost of Citrix and that of other similar solutions.

In terms of capability, Citrix ADC is much better than F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).

Stability-wise, it's also much better than F5, but feature-wise, it's exactly the same. 

Technical support-wise, Citrix ADC is far better than F5.

My recommendation would strictly be to look forward to cloud native because of the operationality, scalability, and native integration in terms of the CI/CD pipeline or DevOps pipeline. It's quite easy if you do that.

Then, if you consider using third-party tools like Citrix ADC, know that there are problems with native integration.

In terms of capability, I would rate Citrix ADC at seven on a scale from one to ten.

We are just publishing applications. We have some clients who need access to these. So, we're hosting the applications for clients. We're also publishing VDIs and using it for processing VDIs.

Citrix Director has been great. It gives us one pane of glass to be able to monitor what's going on with the user sessions as well as to keep on top of the virtual desktops, any servers that may be offline or behaving suspiciously, or any troublesome spots like disconnections. 

We also use Citrix Studio for maintaining the actual servers that are hosting these applications. We use it for delivery groups in case we need to modify delivery groups in regards to which groups have access to which applications. It has been very helpful.

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.

My team has been using it for at least four to five years, and I just joined this team.

It has been pretty stable. The only thing that we've ever experienced is when someone is installing a bad patch or something like that. That has usually been a user error. It wasn't the product; it was the person implementing the patch.

It is very scalable. That's another reason why our company went with Citrix. It is very scalable and versatile. If you are trying to provide to a group that doesn't necessarily need a full-fledged desktop, you can just publish out whatever application is needed. A lot of groups are very appreciative of that. A lot of groups just want to be able to get to the applications they need to do their work. They don't really want to be bogged down with a full-fledged desktop if they just need one application. Citrix gives you the capability to just do that.

You could publish it to many devices. It doesn't have to be a specific desktop. It could be a tablet as long as a person has access to the internet. You're publishing it into a portal where they can just get to that application from anywhere as long as they have maybe an RSA token, Duo, or some type of security authentication and their phone. We have users who are impressed by the fact that they can get to it. As long as they have their Citrix workspace client on their phone, they can get to wherever they need. It is very versatile in delivery.

Right now, we have about 5,000 to 6,000 onshore and offshore users. Our environment supports healthcare, so we need the ability to deliver to those users who may be working within a hospital. As long as they have an internet connection and a browser, they can access our applications. It has been a very valuable tool that allows us to present that outside our environment.

We've had to use them on occasions, and they've been very on point for the initial triaging as well as for the follow-ups. I would rate them an eight or nine out of ten. It was maybe after hours, and it took some time to get to the right engineering team for the issue. It wasn't like we were just waiting on them. It was just getting us over to the right team for a specific issue. After we actually got on the phone with an engineer, they've always been very helpful in getting the issue resolved.

It is pretty straightforward.

I would advise others to just go through and look at the requirements and the needs of the people you're supporting. I will always recommend doing a POC, just to make sure that the product that you're inquiring about or thinking about purchasing does what it says it does because you don't want to be oversold something and it under-delivers. I will always recommend doing some type of POC to test everything out. If it is in your budget, then I would say go with it.

It has improved the way our organization functions. I have been very impressed with the direction in which Citrix is going. I got introduced to Workspace last year, and I attended the virtual SYNERGY conference. It was very impressive to see so many upcoming things that Citrix is working on. I noticed that VMware also has its version of Workspace, so I guess that's the new hot terminology to use. The Citrix solution is called Workspace, and the VMware solution is called Workspace ONE.

I would rate Citrix ADC a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement for any application. That's why they have different versions or a series of applications.

My clients use it for load balancing. 

The tool needs to add a feature where we can access the network policy access manager. 

We are a distributor of Citrix NetScaler for nine years. 

You need to just upload the installation script. The deployment time ranges from minutes to days. 

I would rate the tool a nine out of ten. 

We deploy it for enterprise customers and some schools that are located in Denmark.

The load balancing is one of the most valuable features. We have several load balancing solutions like F5 and Fortinet.

I will try to migrate all the tools to the cloud because there is more lab and more VPN scalability available in the cloud. It is not available on-premises.

I have been using Citrix for the past four years. 

Of course it is stable. We have had some errors, like authentication issues, although those are easy to fix.

It is scalable enough. 

We started with 100 users and now are up to 2,500.

We have contacted their technical support. They provided their contact details, the account manager details, so we contacted them frequently and as required. They are very good. 

We are also familiar with F5.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's deployed in our central location and four different other plants. It's not complex for those types of environments. Including the network setup, the entire deployment took 45 days. 

I did the deployment together with my team. The deployment required four advanced engineers. 

We also evaluated Fortinet but we found that it is not that good a solution in terms of it being user-friendly and it was not very scalable. Comparatively, FortiGate is a good option, and reading-wise I think it's good.

I would tell someone considering this solution to know your use cases and get good documentation. 

When we experienced an issue, we made documents and we can share those documents and share all the details to help provide others with solutions. 

I would rate it a six out of ten. 

From a NetScaler perspective, in terms of LTM, not GSLB, NetScasler has performed very well. In comparison to F5, it holds its own.

For some of my deployments, NetScaler has been strictly a replacement to get something new in. It was cheaper than F5. We took a chance on it. The return on investment is the fact that we spent less money on it. It does do its job and it holds well against F5.

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.

When I compare it to F5 from a hardware or software perspective, they both have their glitches. From a software perspective, either one is not without code bugs.

From an SDX perspective, having the ability to spin up a VPX, the way we spin up our regular features, quickly and have a 60-day trial while we spin up VPXs will give us the opportunity to do more proof of concept work quickly without having to buy the license and download the VPX. A feature like this would be helpful. 

I would also like to have video tutorials so that when you click the help link, you have the option to go to the Citrix forum and get information and help from other people and other users. Something that points you out to a tutorial video link that is a general overview. 

I liked the fact that is NetScaler out-of-the-box is intuitive. You can catch on fairly quickly. Especially when you're doing an advanced alert. You cannot do a re-direct quickly without going through some documentation and if nobody's done it before, they don't know what you're talking about. That is when a help link would be useful that could direct you to the right tutorial video and then it could point you directly after that video to further direction and explanation. Straight to the meat of things. Something like a quick video tip tutorial would be great. Whereas if you're an F5 customer, you don't get something like this and you do have DevCentral that you can go to get information, but it requires you to read through many documents and comb through trying to configure something that is complex. They should deliver the information quickly to end users to make it even faster and more efficient to deliver our own applications and services to customers.

Video files can be large, they don't necessarily have to be on the box itself, but even through a link that quickly goes to their website or YouTube, whatever platform, could work. 

I would like to see them make it easier to do some of the more complex things. For example, a web re-direct requires two pieces to it. You have two ports and when people want to go to a web page, they just type in the webpage that on the backend will redirect them to a secure link. The initial setup of that is cumbersome because you have to do it twice. There are things that can be replicated. The IP address, for example, is the same. This change would go a long way. Don't make me do it twice and don't make me have to read tons of documentation to figure out how to do it. Ease of configuration for some of the more complex processes would be a good improvement. 

It has high stability. I deployed these in hospitals where lives matter. The contention was whether or not to go with F5 because it's the leader in the marketplace and they have 70% of the market shares. Even though NetScaler is big, it still doesn't hold the fair market share. NetScaler is the underdog but it is very stable. I've seen it in hospital environments where lives matter, it's held its own, it does what it says it's going to do and it does it well. It's certainly a top contender, if not an equal contender with its counterpart, F5. 

Scalability is very impressive. The way it works is that you can collapse everything on to a couple of platforms, small, medium, and large. The small one is obviously an initial buy-in. The mid one is fairly powerful and is bigger than an 8920. You are limited on the hardware. You get 64 and you get 32 out of the box, which is what you paid for but you can license up the 64. On the other platform, you can start off at 32 with the initial buy-in and then license up from there for a max of around 256 gig. The way they have it is that you are locked in from a hardware perspective.

Their technical support is decent. It could use some improvement. Help desks and technical support are good but you can tell that there's been turnover. We'll have complex issues that we're trying to work through and we would like somebody who's more experienced and not somebody who had just gone through training. Employee retention on the help desk would go a long way. 

NetScaler does the same thing as an F5 and it's cheaper.

There was some trepidation regarding the initial setup because it's new equipment and nobody has had training for it. We were able to figure it out and stand it up. It took some reading and some calls to tech support, but they were helpful when we were first setting it up.

There are the regular license costs and you also have to pay for licenses if you want more DPXs or whatever. A standard DPX is fairly cheap. It's around $7,000. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten because nobody is a ten. I would give it a nine if it was a little easier to pick up. Out of the box it's easy. Anybody who's an engineer can usually pick it up or if they've had previous load balancing experience, it's easy. Obviously, not everybody has that kind of experience. 

Not many of our customers use the solution's web application firewall. We use the solution's IP Reputation and bot protection features. We use the solution mostly as Citrix and Gateway ICA proxy and load balancing. There are a lot of changes with the solution, but Citrix NetScaler has quite a comprehensive portfolio of training courses.

The licensing model and technical support of the solution could be improved. The exchange rate with the local currency contributes a lot to why some of our customers are looking at alternatives.

I have been working with Citrix NetScaler since it first came onto the market. I have been using the solution before the Gateway feature was a part of NetScaler, and it was a stand-alone product. I have been using the solution since Citrix acquired the product.

Citrix NetScaler is a scalable solution.

Citrix NetScaler has many features. The solution's basic features, like load balancing and Gateway, are pretty easy to use. It becomes complicated very, very quickly in large environments because it has many features. I would recommend the solution to other users.

There are much cheaper alternatives if you just need the solution for basic load balancing. There are no alternatives to Citrix NetScaler if you want to use it as a Gateway and access it from the public network. Integrating Citrix NetScaler with the existing infrastructure and applications is pretty straightforward once you get the hang of things.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It has many use cases. It is used for the high availability of the service and for connecting local sites or geolocation sites called GSNP. 

We are selling all of its models. Citrix ADC can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises.

Citrix ADC has increased the productivity of the staff by keeping all the applications available all the time.

It also increased the security of the online application by enabling the web application firewall feature.

With the amazing scalability features of the Citric ADC, we have been able to save money.

High availability, performance, scalability, and security are the main pillars. It enhances the security for accessing the applications.

It is very user-friendly, and it works fine. The management of the device is very easy from a technical perspective.

It does not have a sandbox cloud service and antivirus. It should have on-prem or cloud sandboxing and antivirus.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

They have awesome support. I can give them a four and a half out of five.

Positive

It has a medium level of complexity. It is not complex, and it is also not that easy.

Its price is comparable to others and affordable.

I would advise doing proper sizing and proper configuration to get the maximum benefits of this solution.

I would rate Citrix ADC an eight out of ten. Everything is very good in this solution.