We compared F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Citrix NetScaler based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is praised for its efficient traffic distribution and excellent customer service, with users highlighting the product's positive return on investment. In contrast, Citrix NetScaler stands out for its robust load balancing capabilities, security features, and scalability. Users also appreciate the competitive pricing and responsiveness of the support team. Enhancements desired for F5 BIG-IP LTM include improved documentation and user interfaces, while Citrix NetScaler users seek improved scalability and compatibility with applications.
Features: F5 BIG-IP LTM excels in efficiently distributing traffic, managing load, enhancing application performance, and ensuring high availability. Citrix NetScaler stands out with robust load balancing, security features against DDoS attacks, secure remote access, and seamless scalability.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is described as easy and straightforward, without any complications. It offers flexible and customizable licensing options. Citrix NetScaler also has a straightforward and easy setup cost, with users mentioning its cost-effectiveness. It offers competitive and reasonable pricing and flexible licensing options., F5 BIG-IP LTM and Citrix NetScaler both offer favorable ROI according to user feedback. F5 LTM is valued for its contribution to business success, while Citrix NetScaler delivers positive outcomes and benefits for users.
Room for Improvement: The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) could benefit from better documentation, more intuitive user interfaces, streamlined workflows, improved ease of use, more responsive customer support, and timely updates. In comparison, users of Citrix NetScaler desire improved scalability, more intuitive interfaces, enhanced documentation and support, and resolution of compatibility issues with certain applications.
Deployment and customer support: The user feedback for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) indicates varying durations for establishing a new tech solution, with some users mentioning three months for deployment and an additional week for setup, while others mention a week for both. Citrix NetScaler users mention different timeframes for deployment and setup, emphasizing that both should be considered or that they may refer to the same period., The customer service for F5 BIG-IP LTM is highly commendable, with knowledgeable and responsive representatives. Users appreciate the prompt resolution of issues and professional support. Citrix NetScaler also provides satisfactory customer service with a helpful and responsive support team, offering effective solutions.
The summary above is based on 60 interviews we conducted recently with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Citrix NetScaler users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The solution is easy to work with and manage."
"I found that the GUI was very easy to to navigate. If you were looking for something, it was fairly easy to find. There's a lot of third-party documentation and information available online as well."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The load balancing is one of the most valuable features."
"Unified Gateway allows me to provide secure external access to applications for suppliers and customers while requiring Multi-Factor Authentication."
"The solution improves security performance."
"The solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of F5 BIG-IP LTM is brand image and recognition and the application delivery controller."
"Users can see a remarkable performance difference from a qualitative sense."
"LTM."
"We are fond of the load balancing feature for DNS and servers."
"it has TCP LAN and WAN optimization features. It has has caching."
"LTM's most valuable features include application security, data collection, and parameter-level rules."
"The F5 interface is easy to use."
"I've worked a little bit with iRules and it is amazing."
"We would like to see some fairly large scale improvement in the configuration process for this solution."
"There are certain features that are very useful and Citrix makes you pay a bit more for them."
"Citrix NetScaler has been recently acquired by another company and the support has been negatively impacted, the solution is at its end of life. The support for the solution could improve. The sales team needs to be improved."
"Maybe creating policies with simple regular expressions."
"The product provides some templates to integrate with applications like MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, SAP Enterprise Portal, and others. However, the last update for these templates was 2013 (lots of applications are running on versions newer then 2013)."
"The only thing customers told me that could be improved is that they would like to be able to purchase and receive the products in one box, rather than two boxes. This is something related to marketing, though."
"There is room for improvement regarding the pricing policy for Citrix offices."
"Overall the price of Citrix ADC could be more competitive."
"The web interface could be better."
"For a future release, I would like to see more features in the cloud."
"F5 has another solution to load balance servers on the cloud, which they got after the purchase of NGINX. It is deployed as Kubernetes or something like that, but the problem now is that they have two solutions for two situations. They should make F5 deployable on the cloud."
"The pricing model has caused some frustration. My clients implemented the solution and later wanted to upgrade the features but the pricing structure was complicated. There are other solutions with better pricing models."
"A lot of functions that are attributed to iRules can actually be simple profile changes. iRules do have a certain performance impact. Therefore, instead of writing simple iRules, they can create certain profiles for classes that will perform the same function."
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager could improve by having an FNI feature for a single source to multi-domain load balancing."
"I would like them to expand load balancing, being able to go across multiple regions to on-premise and into the cloud. This could use improvement, as it is sometimes a little cumbersome."
"Technical support could be improved."
More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Citrix NetScaler is ranked 2nd in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 85 reviews while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is ranked 1st in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 116 reviews. Citrix NetScaler is rated 8.4, while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Citrix NetScaler writes "Optimizing application delivery and ensuring robust network performance with its excellent stability and comprehensive load-balancing capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) writes "Helps deliver applications to users in a reliable, secure, and optimized way". Citrix NetScaler is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Fortinet FortiADC, HAProxy, Loadbalancer.org and A10 Networks Thunder ADC, whereas F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is most compared with Fortinet FortiADC, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, HAProxy and A10 Networks Thunder ADC. See our Citrix NetScaler vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report.
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