Citrix Gateway (or Citrix NetScaler Gateway) is an access gateway with SSL VPN solution, providing single sign-on (SSO) and authentication for remote end users of network assets.
$995
per month
NGINX
Score 9.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…
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Pricing
Citrix Gateway
NGINX
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Citrix Gateway
NGINX
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
The price for a Citrix Gateway (VPX) perpetual license is $995.00.
You must contact the sales team for subscription license pricing.
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Community Pulse
Citrix Gateway
NGINX
Features
Citrix Gateway
NGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Citrix is used by everyone in our Company globally across departments, and provides a standardized, very clean, rarely-changing launchpad for all the common apps your team may need. It connects to Okta for necessary security. From my understanding, app assignment to users from the back end is also very simple. That being said, while the lack of changes over the years helps with guides and familiarity, Citrix is not without it's flaws that could use updating - apps refusing to open, scheduled app crashing at 12:00pm EST every day, setup being not as streamlined as it could be for new users, ease of use lacking on the desktop app, lack of accessible guides/quick walkthrough of what the platform is upon first login, etc. Overall, I look forward to improvements for Citrix, though overall I appreciate it's simplicity leading to visual ease of navigation.
[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.
allows seamless use of 2-factor authentication for heightened security within the VPN, and lowers risk of an external hack because of it.
it allows for differing levels of security. access can be set specifically through the VPN so 2 users can use the same site and get different results depending on their active directory security policy.
It can grant the ability to launch a single application or an entire VPN envelope
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.
Citrix is a visually very clean platform, allowing for ease of use from even the least tech-savvy. That being said, the apps crashes a lot (scheduled or otherwise), and apps very often refuse to open from the dashboard, making for a frustrating/confusing experience from those who have not yet experienced these same issues daily for years now. The launcher app (for MacBook) leaves a lot to be desired in terms of both setup and daily use, making the web version more viable. First-time users are also often confused on what Citrix is - and how each app connects in order to open a program (explaining "log into Citrix on the web, then download the launcher app, then launch the Spectra app via Citrix web, which will open in the Citrix launcher app on your laptop to launch the app, but you have to paste in the URL again and log in again to access" is a handful)
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.
Support is pretty good and pretty fast to respond. I can't say I can really complain about the support experience I've had with them, as they've resolved issues within a reasonable time-frame. Of course, they could always be faster and better, but I think for what we pay, it's well worth the money.
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.
We chose Citrix Netscaler Gateway for its wide market presence and its great experience over time. Although the implementation time may be longer than in the other solutions, I think the results are better and it allows configuration with greater capacity than the others. The cost is similar in all the solutions seen.
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
The largest positive impact was that it provided a path up upgrade from the now defunct CSG Citrix product. Because Netscaler Gateway is an at cost product, where CSG was not, one could argue there is no monetary ROI but the ROI in this scenario comes more from the ability to not have to use a non Citrix product and learn the skills needed to administer it.
Negative wise, Netscaler Gateway can be quite costly in both upfront costs and maintenance fees. It is part of business and a requirement but when using it as a replacement for CSG you will have to account for several thousands of dollars per year in additional cost.
Because it can implemented as a virtual server (it comes in both hardware and non hardware versions) the lack of need to add one more piece of hardware to our data center saves in space, up front costs, and power/cooling needs if you opt to go with the software based version.
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.
