Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
F5 BIG-IP DNS
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
F5 BIG-IP DNS (formerly BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager) secures DNS infrastructure.N/A
F5 BIG-IP
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
F5 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.N/A
HAProxy Community Edition
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
HAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.
$0
Pricing
F5 BIG-IP DNSF5 BIG-IPHAProxy Community Edition
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 BIG-IP DNSF5 BIG-IPHAProxy Community Edition
Free Trial
NoNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 BIG-IP DNSF5 BIG-IPHAProxy Community Edition
Considered Multiple Products
F5 BIG-IP DNS
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
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.
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
It integrates well with our existing knowledge base.
Chose F5 BIG-IP DNS
DNS defines IP, LTM received and handles the Traffic, all encrypted
F5 BIG-IP
Chose F5 BIG-IP
F5 BIG-IP is More stable, and has more features by far.
Chose F5 BIG-IP
Ease of used. Not that complex. Better support by the principle. A better product than the other load balancer brands
Chose F5 BIG-IP
F5 BIG-IP is the gold standard in load balancing and traffic prioritization.
Chose F5 BIG-IP
The company was already utilizing F5 BIG-IP when I started.
Chose F5 BIG-IP
I used NGINX and Cloudflare CDN and now that F5 owns NGINX it’s been an easy switch. Cloudflare has a very intuitive platform that makes it easy to get up and running. Most of my experience is with F5 and I’m happy to say it’s made my experience streamlined enough that I …
Chose F5 BIG-IP
We have multiple vendors in our environment. As we have a number of F5 devices already deployed keeping them fed and happy is a task. We continue with F5 as the data plane is solid and management tools are consistent with automation objectives.
Chose F5 BIG-IP
All of the products listed are used in tangence with F5 BIG-IP.
Chose F5 BIG-IP
Since we are F5 shop we wanted to have a single pane of glass for all the F5's ONPREM and CLOUD so we wanted to do a POV on F5 XC
HAProxy Community Edition
Chose HAProxy Community Edition
1st, HAProxy is free and a full software-based.
2nd, it has outperformed the BIG-IP in every test case.
3rd, we LOVE HAProxy.
Chose HAProxy Community Edition
We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, …
Chose HAProxy Community Edition
The cost is significantly lower and personally I don't find one to be harder to learn than the other. Overall they features stack up pretty closely and I'd pick HAProxy wherever it was feasible and we can save a tremendous amount of money for the business. The NetScalers & …
Best Alternatives
F5 BIG-IP DNSF5 BIG-IPHAProxy Community Edition
Small Businesses
NGINX
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Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
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Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
F5 BIG-IP DNSF5 BIG-IPHAProxy Community Edition
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(17 ratings)
9.2
(187 ratings)
9.0
(7 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.7
(9 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(6 ratings)
8.8
(59 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(10 ratings)
9.7
(2 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 BIG-IP DNSF5 BIG-IPHAProxy Community Edition
Likelihood to Recommend
F5
Less appropriate: - Not best bet for startup’s as their budget is always tight - Not good for those companies where the engineers are not highly skilled otherwise the use Irules and security policies will not be utilised in optimal manner as it requires more cpu resources to work especially irules - For companies fully on cloud doesn’t best fit as I already highlighted cloud require more improvements when it comes to seamless performance Best Suited -Large enterprise companies where budget is not an issue - Companies whose traffic Rate Per Second is very high as it can handle huge RPS without latency - Companies whose business is surely depends on their availability
Read full review
F5
Application delivery of both simple and advanced applications. It's easy to handle certificate management that do require individual certificates to be installed on each backend server, you can just install the certificate on the F5 BIG-IP and use for multiple backends. Also adding WAF is as simple as adding a generic policy and you will cover 80% of the scenarios.
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Open Source
It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
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Pros
F5
  • Routing the traffic to multiple data centers deployed in different locations
  • Examines the servers health, performance metrics and do evaluation on the basis of geography as well to redirect queries to optimal destination
  • Provides rate limiting feature to mitigate DDos and DNS flood attacks
  • Best in routing the traffic to multiple clouds including on prem resources
  • Faster results of the queries and reduced latency is one of the biggest advantages of F5 BIG-IP DNS
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F5
  • It's reliable. We've had very little problems with the technology. Performance is always right on. Metrics are great. They come out of it. We'd like to do more probably with it in the future as we start to grow a lot more.
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Open Source
  • Low-Cost Load Balancer
  • Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
  • Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
  • SSL Termination
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Cons
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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F5
  • Recently we have been deploying F5 web application firewall and we have started the deployment. We have already moved applications out there, but we are not yet to the point wherein I could comment any positive feedback or any negative feedback because we are still going through it, right. But as far as I'm concerned, I don't see any drawbacks or any shortcomings on the F5 product lineup.
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Open Source
  • A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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F5
Stability of product and easy way to have account manager contact. F5 support team is also always available to help with major issues. Last year during the major OS upgrade F5 team and F5 leadership always shared clear information and F5 team was dedicated to help us to have it closed in record time
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Usability
F5
Most important usability of F5 BIG-IP DNS is it’s stability which other vendors lack -As mentioned earlier as well, it’s scalability is humongous as it can honour millions of request per second without latency - irules feature makes it top and worthy to fight with top contenders like cloudflare and Cisco - Moreover it’s stable even when the Rate Per second is high and at the same time, DDos occurs - Interface is user friendly for simple tasks but requires more manual work - TAC should provide more assistance when it comes to normal support as well but they do offer professional support license for tasks which other vendor assist on normal license as well
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F5
It actually satisfies the use cases, but I would like to know what it can do more than just the use cases, which is what I'm looking for, to talk at some point with somebody and figure out what to do next. We probably maybe could be able to do more that we don't know yet.
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Open Source
It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
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Support Rating
F5
No answers on this topic
F5
I've supported F5 for three different companies. Our F5 support has been very consistent, regardless who the customer is. F5 technicians are very experienced and provide good support, even when issues are more related to knowledge than they are with the ability of the product to do what you need it to do.
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Open Source
We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
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In-Person Training
F5
No answers on this topic
F5
Practical cases and hands on , many hours of training with tipical cases
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
F5
No answers on this topic
F5
implementation is fine
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
F5
That's the one thing that really stood out. It was a lot easier to use from an administrator standpoint, so I think that's the one thing that really made our team decide to go with this product versus another competitor. Just ease of use.
Read full review
Open Source
We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
Read full review
Return on Investment
F5
  • Saved almost 1.2 million USD for one of critical activities as downtime could have posed this but due to failover based on health checks saved these bucks
  • Business impact which can be caused due to DDos attacks avoided
  • High cost licensing as mentioned earlier as well
  • Analytical limitations as F5 has also mentioned multiple it’s not an analytical tool
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F5
  • The F5 BIG-IP has improved all our load balancing needs, we have over 400 LTM VIPs in our environment this all use to be done with DNS round Robin configurations.
  • we have created unique APM solutions to support our external customer base
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Open Source
  • Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
  • Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
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ScreenShots