Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. NGINX

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

[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.

Incentivized

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

• Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
• Great at serving static content.
• Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
• Open-Source (no cost)!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
• I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
• It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
• It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
• I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.

Great value for the product

Incentivized

Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.

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

Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.

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 have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because

• we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
• we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
• individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely

Incentivized

• 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.

• Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
• Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
• Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.

Incentivized