Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Kemp LoadMaster

Easy to use and reliable, with very little maintenance required and zero downtime to date. For the education sector, ease of use is hugely important as IT Managers/Technicians are often "Jack of all trades" with a good, broad general knowledge but perhaps lacking specific expertise in certain aspects. Being provided with easy-to-follow tutorials and instructions has been very useful in setting up and configuring the firewall, especially as my background is more in desktop support.

Incentivized

Loadmaster is very powerful and flexible load balancer. Variety of options allows to create a complex network of rules and routes. During our website rollout Loadmaster allowed us to run multiple generations of the website simultaneously and seamlessly by doing the content switching on the fly. Powerful API allows easy integration into any development lifecycle.

Incentivized

• Email Filtering and Inspection
• Web-based intrusions and attacks
• Traffic Patterns

• Where the LoadBalancer excels is the multiple levels at which you can load balance servers. We currently use layer 7 LB, but others are available as well.
• I particularly like the ability for the LB to know when servers are down, and if all are offline then you can create a redirect to a static HTML page or some other destination that is more informative.
• The ease in which a service can be created and deployed using already pre-canned templates makes it a very convenient setup process.

Incentivized

• Reports could be somewhat confusing.
• The initial setup was a little difficult for our Security Admin team.

Incentivized

• Ability to 'clone' existing Virtual Services for rapid deployment of similar ones.
• A better API for ease of automation.
• Simplification of Certificate management.
• Better explanations of Kemp implementations of industry standard protocols like VRRP (or CARP)
• More control over device factory reset configuration and forcibly breaking HA pairs at boot time

Incentivized

I'm very pleased with the support I've received as well as the quality of the product.

Incentivized

Kemp makes it very easy to setup, configure and manage the LoadMaster without needing a lot of help from their engineers. The interface is very easy to understand and intuitive to use. We like how it is not complicated - I can easily have one of my techs login and they can figure out how to setup/configure virtual services for load balancing without needing a manual or tech support.

Incentivized

The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is easy to use. Support from Barracuda is great also. Load Balancing of the Web Application Firewall is also nice. This allows you to do maintenance or have large loads for the end-user. Threat monitoring of our network and traffic coming into our services within our cloud solution.

Incentivized

Support has been easy to deal with; I have only need[ed] to contact them a few times during setup. Once its been in place and operational, we have not need[ed] to mess with the system [which] is a huge advantage. I like system[s] that do not break and require constant attention in a production environment.

The installation was straight forward. Once i installed it, their technical support team helped me with configuration

Incentivized

We have used SonicWalls and WatchGuard firewall appliances neither are even remotely close to the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. In addition, Barracuda support is fantastic. Throw in the 4 year (free) refresh cycle and there is no reason we would even consider the other two again (at least for the foreseeable future).

Incentivized

We chose Kemp LoadMaster because it is 1/10 the price of the competition and MUCH easier to deploy and configure and WORKS. We have had ZERO issues with the product since installation. Their engineers and their sales team have both reached out post-install to check in and see if everything is working as expected.

• Negative impact: a default port was open and missed by one of our techs.
• Positive impact: it protects us everyday now that we have it locked down.

• We used Kemp LoadMaster for many projects. For a lot of customers, load balancers were too expensive or too complicated before we introduced Kemp products.
• It's not a overly complicated product, so we were able to train many engineers on it and have them get a certification.

Incentivized