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F5 BIG-IP DNS vs. HAProxy Community Edition vs. IBM DataPower Gateway

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 BIG-IP DNS

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/AF5 BIG-IP DNS (formerly BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager) secures DNS infrastructure.N/A

    HAProxy Community Edition

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/AHAProxy 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

    IBM DataPower Gateway

    Score9.5 out of 10
    N/AThe IBM DataPower Gateway is a security and integration platform.N/A
    Pricing
    F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community EditionIBM DataPower Gateway
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community EditionIBM DataPower Gateway
    Free Trial
    NoNoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYesNo
    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 DNSHAProxy Community EditionIBM DataPower Gateway
    Considered Multiple Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Open Source
    No answer on this topic
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    19 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    17 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    19 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    18 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    18 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community EditionIBM DataPower Gateway
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Mule ESB
    Score8.3 out of 10
    Enterprises
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Mule ESB
    Score8.3 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community EditionIBM DataPower Gateway
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (19 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    8.2
    (3 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.5
    (8 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.7
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 BIG-IP DNSHAProxy Community EditionIBM DataPower Gateway
    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
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    IBM
    WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    F5
    • I love this product, especially DoH because it's not able to do the same functionality in NextGen firewalls on our edge location because of the nature that integrated with the F5 BIG-IP, the V we provide for our external clients and we love it the most because it's, it's right in the same box, we use it and then we get the benefits out of the same big IP boxes, same VE boxes. And I think that's the only aspect we liked the most.
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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    IBM
    • The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
    • DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
    • The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    IBM
    • API security
    • WAF improvements
    • Security improvements
    • REST support
    • Kafka support and event streaming
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    Cost of the appliance
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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    IBM
    In terms of usability, it has many advantages over other competitors in terms of integration, as it allows for the optimized creation of integration flows in a very quick and intuitive way from browsers, allowing for granular export and import of work, guaranteeing compatibility between different versions of the product.
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    Support Rating
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Incentivized
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    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    IBM
    In his brand DataPower has not competitors, in security, transform and data validations DataPower is better than other products.
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    F5
    • Well, yes, I would say a big impact for ours. We were able to have more visibilities and trying to allow those traffic that we weren't able to see what is behind the scene and then reduce a lot of attackers. And then it led us to actually allow our clients freely using the DOT or DOH.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    IBM
    • It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
    • We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
    • It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots