Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. NetScaler

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

Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.

Incentivized

• Attack patterns are regularly updates through contents via Barracuda Web Application Firewall update servers
• Bot Protection has a good line feature to verify between the genuine clients like browsers and bots
• Dos Protection also good level of protection to mitigate Layer 7 attacks
• Allow Deny Rules provides a lot of granular controls to allow and deny the traffic
• URL profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
• Parameter profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
• Risk score feature for the clients to mitigate attacks is also very good feature
• Client fingerprint module can be used against malicious user to enhance security
• Separate XML and JSOn profile for all the URL profiles of the application is plus
• API security is very much effective and shadow API can also be identified

• Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin.
• Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow.
• Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood.

Incentivized

• STM crashes sometimes happen due to unusual traffic pattern
• Obfuscation on the client side user credentials which appears in the developer tools of browser
• URL Profiles redundancy during the learning of traffic needs to be fixed
• Dos Protection should be more granular like escalation period to throw JS challenge, Captcha and rate limit when escalation period hits until the WAF stops the attack
• Client Fingerprinting should work as expected when verifying the clients as in rare some scenarios, it creates issues

• The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful.
• Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security.

Incentivized

-User friendly interface for quick learning -Quick deployment for deploying applications -Easy to manage for naive -System components and upgradation of the WAF is very easy go with -Back restoration is very to make it up and ready anytime -Seperate JSON and XmL profiles for each URLs of the application is plus -Amazing and world class support engineer in comparison other vendors and always available to support -Quick resolution on bugs with their patch applying process

I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.

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

Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.

Incentivized

We have been using their Backup products especially Backup Appliances and legacy products like Intronis. We are also using their Cloud Backup Solutions for O365. This is the reason we opted for this product.

easy to use and setup and reliable. Once the configuration was setup and running this has been really useful and easy to maintain. The other solutions seemed overly complicated and difficult to configure and get up and running with the security that we required

Incentivized

• Much better response times for remote transactions
• 4 year refresh cycle included with active support contracts
• More expensive than traditional firewalls (however its superior to those, not apples to apples)

Incentivized

• We had this set up before COVID and it saved us. We just added user licenses and scaled out our citrix farm and IT sat back and just monitored users from home.
• Scales up and out with ease
• Challenging to find NetScaler experts for advanced features you want to enable and use

Incentivized