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F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.
Best Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) 2026
Application delivery controllers (ADC) are devices housed in a data center between firewalls and application servers, existing basically for the purpose of application acceleration, reducing load on websites and performing load balancing, as well as other features (SSL offload, proxy/reverse proxy, a firewall for web applications, and more). They are part of an application delivery network (ADN), along with WAN optimization controllers (WOCs).
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All Products(1-25 of 37)
- 2F5 BIG-IP software from Seattle-based F5 Networks is a load balancing and application protection solution suite available on cloud or via virtual editions, on a subscription or perpetual licensing basis.
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NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software ... - 4
Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability. - 5
LoadMaster from Kemp Technologies in New York is an application delivery controller. - 6
NetScaler ADC is an application delivery controller. - 7
Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple ... - 8More than 75% of enterprises today operate in multiple clouds, according to the 2022 F5 State of Application Strategy Report. But a much smaller percentage are known to have implemented a cloud-based DNS (Domain Name System), which offers considerable speed and performance benefits for publishing ...
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NGINX Plus is presented as a cloud‑native, easy-to-use reverse proxy, load balancer, and API gateway, from F5. - 10
Microsoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall. - 11
The Cisco Application Control Engine is... an application delivery controller. - 12
Pinggy is presented as a simple localhost tunneling solution. With Pinggy, users can create HTTP, TCP, UDP, or TLS tunnels to a localhost, enabling instant access to websites or applications, even behind firewalls and NATs.There is no need to download anything, no complex server configurations - ... - 13
EdgeNexus is an ADC/Load Balancer used to implement and manage security, traffic, SSO/Pre-authentication, and, of course, load balancing.EdgeNexus advantages, as presented by the vendor:- Includes an App Store for future-proofing/expandability by adding more features such as Global Server Load ... - 14
The Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is a Secure Application Delivery Controller that enables Application Availability, Acceleration and Control, while providing Application Security Capabilities. - 15
A unified ingress platform for developers, a simplified API-first ingress-as-a-service designed to add connectivity, security, and observability to apps in one line. ngrok aims to reduce the complexity of application and API delivery by unifying multiple point tools, accelerating time to market and ... - 16
Ivanti vADC (formerly Pulse vADC, for Virtual Application Delivery Controller) is composed of three products which can be combined to suit the needs of applications. The solution is now from Ivanti since the company's December, 2020 acquisition of Pulse Secure. - 17
Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) built on open source technology, available as hardware or virtual solutions. - 18Microsoft's Azure Load Balancer provides built-in load balancing for cloud services and virtual machines, so the user can create highly-available and scalable applications in minutes.
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F5 on IBM Cloud lets you see and control all traffic passing through your network. F5’s highly scalable, resilient and reusable services dynamically adapt to ensure application availability, performance and security. - 20
Akamai offers the Ion application delivery controller suite to automatically supply performance optimization to websites and mobile or web applications. - 21
Haltdos ADC is an enterprise-grade Application Delivery Controller solution that provides high-speed delivery controlling and optimization. Haltdos ADC solution provides NAT and Routing for client and server, Load balancing capabilities from the transport layer to the application layer. HTTP and ... - 22
A10 Networks offers their application delivery controller, Thunder ADC. - 23
HAProxy Enterprise is a software load balancer that powers modern application delivery at any scale and in any environment, providing performance, observability and security. - 24
FortiADC, from Fortinet in San Francisco, is an application delivery controller based on technology acquired with Coyote Point in 2013. - 25
Radware Alteon, from Israeli company Radware, is an application delivery controller.
Learn More about Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Software
What are Application Delivery Controllers?
An application delivery controller (ADC) is a network component that manages and optimizes client connections to web and application servers. Its capabilities are implemented through either a hardware device or software. ADCs are housed in a data center between network firewalls and application servers and are a part of application delivery networks (ADNs) along with WAN (wide area network) optimization controllers (WOCs).
Application delivery controllers are used to accelerate application delivery, maintain website performance, and promote application availability, visibility, security, and scalability.
ADCs speed up application delivery through load balancing, SSL offloading, smart caching, and intelligent compression. ADCs can include firewalls and intrusion detection, fend off DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks and provide analytics regarding application performance.
ADCs help support outward-facing applications such as eCommerce sites and internal applications such as CRM, ERP, BI, MS Exchange, and SharePoint. Software-defined networking trends have pushed ADCs to function more like SaaS (software-as-a-service).
Organizations that use large-scale delivery content networks (CDNs), employ application delivery controllers to ensure responsive and secure web application services for their high-volume sites. IT, network, and DevOps teams manage and analyze application delivery controller performance.
Application Delivery Controllers Features
Application delivery controllers will have many of these features
- Application acceleration
- Load balancing / global load balancing
- Caching
- Compression
- SSL offloading
- Proxy and reverse proxy
- Bandwidth management
- Traffic shaping
- TCP multiplexing
- Multi-tenancy architecture support
- Security, SSO (single sign-on), application authorization
- Application and server health monitoring
- Web application firewall
- DNS firewall
- Intrusion detection
- DDoS protection
Application Delivery Controllers Comparison
Consider the following when purchasing application delivery controllers.
Application delivery controller physical device vs ADC software: A physical device supports more features, has better performance due to customized computer chips and specialized network interfaces, and comes at a higher cost than its software counterpart. The software implementation is more flexible, offers a simplified infrastructure, runs on any infrastructure including a public cloud, can be provisioned on-demand, and is priced lower than an ADC physical device.
Scope of Features: ADC’s offer a broad range of features, however, if your needs are limited to Load Balancing Software, for example, no need to countenance the higher costs that ADCs with extensive features will incur.
ADC Capacity: Determine your requirements for incoming connections per minute, and the amount of bandwidth that will need to be managed along with any scaling up requirements that may occur in the future. ADCs offer different capacity levels, with their costs increasing as their capacities expand.
Pricing Information
Pricing is dependent upon the features and capacity of the application delivery controller, and whether it is a physical device or a virtual software appliance. Pricing models can be for a perpetual license or a monthly fee. Basic physical devices can be found starting at around $1,000 dollars while full-featured, high-capacity, enterprise-level physical devices can cost up to and over $200,000. Software versions pricing is based on the number of connections, bandwidth, and rules to be applied. Vendor price quotes are usually required. Free trials are usually available.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) FAQs
What do application delivery controllers do?
Application delivery controllers (ADCs) accelerate application delivery and enhance website performance by optimizing client connections to web and application servers. ADCs offer either a hardware device or software.
What are the benefits of using application delivery controllers?
Application delivery controllers optimize application and website performance, eliminating downtime, making applications highly available and secure. ADCs support business continuity automatically providing ‘work arounds’ when encountering networking issues. These features help ensure satisfactory user experiences and help sustain in-house team productivity.
What are the best application delivery controllers?
Popular application delivery controllers include:
How much do application delivery controllers cost?
Physical application delivery control devices are priced higher than ADC software. The actual cost is determined by the ADC’s capacity and features. Physical devices have a broad range of pricing ranging from $1,000 to over $200,000. Software pricing is based on the bandwidth, number of connections and rules supported. Free trials are usually available.