Azure Application Gateway vs. F5 BIG-IP DNS

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Application Gateway
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall.N/A
F5 BIG-IP DNS
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
F5 BIG-IP DNS (formerly BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager) secures DNS infrastructure.N/A
Pricing
Azure Application GatewayF5 BIG-IP DNS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Application GatewayF5 BIG-IP DNS
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Application GatewayF5 BIG-IP DNS
Best Alternatives
Azure Application GatewayF5 BIG-IP DNS
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.8 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure Application GatewayF5 BIG-IP DNS
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(8 ratings)
9.3
(17 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.3
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Application GatewayF5 BIG-IP DNS
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.
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F5
It's well suited. Like I said, it provides us, it provides the clients and the business environments throughout an Internal Revenue Service. The network visibility needed for them to provide their application and the use of their applications throughout the Internal Revenue Service and the enterprise, as far as IRS.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management.
  • With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network.
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F5
  • The easy of importing DNS records into the BIG-IP
  • The ease of searching and locating records
  • The speed of creating multiple records when you need to duplicate effort.
  • The DNS dashboards to see requests and data points.
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Cons
Microsoft
  • More cost-effective pricing plans are welcome for the future, especially for WAF
  • Ability to automate the TLS certificate renewal procedure
  • Ability to manage non-HTTP traffic
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F5
  • I'd like to see better reporting capabilities on the decision-making process for DNS resolutions. Currently there are plenty of log messages for that, but I'd like to see tighter integration into the GUI.
  • It could be an improvement to better discriminate features intended for AA vs LDNS functionality within the GUI.
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
F5
We use this heavily and it is one of the best products out there for this type of use case. We already have LTMs and to leverage GTM on top of that is just a piece of cake. Everything is so well integrated its amazing
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Usability
Microsoft
Most of the Application Gateway's features and services can be managed and re-configured via either the Azure Portal GUI or via the Azure Cloud Shell, thus allowing both CLI modes, i.e. Azure CLI (Bash) and Azure Powershell. The v2 version of Application Gateway has significantly improved performance during initial configuration or during re-configuration changes, thus making it much more usable for IT admins, as compared to v1.
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F5
I think the interface that you guys have, it is pretty user friendly. I personally find it easy to work with.
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Support Rating
Microsoft
I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.
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F5
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and Azure Traffic Manager) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features. Azure Firewall, although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.
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F5
As I mentioned, the GSLB capability, being able to do intelligent DNS by having access to monitor specific endpoints associated to my current BIG-IP infrastructure, I believe that brings a huge value, then combine fast responses and security.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Positive : Improved performance and scalability
  • Positive : Better and enhanced Security
  • Positive : Efficiency
  • Negative: Cost
  • Negative: More resources to manage.
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F5
  • Protection against security threats using DNS as a vector.
  • Protection against security threats targeting DNS itself.
  • Provide top user experience to application clients, by directing their requests to where they will be treated with the best performance.
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ScreenShots