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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. Imperva Application Firewall vs. NGINX

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

    Score9.6 out of 10
    N/AF5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.N/A

    Imperva Application Firewall

    Score10 out of 10
    N/AImperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) stops attacks with near-zero false positives and a global SOC to ensure organizations are protected from the latest attacks minutes after they are discovered in the wild.N/A

    NGINX

    Score9.1 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…N/A
    Pricing
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Application FirewallNGINX
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Application FirewallNGINX
    Free Trial
    NoNoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Application FirewallNGINX
    Considered Multiple Products
    F5
    Chose F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) has more features, cost is higher in some scenarios, lower in others
    Incentivized
    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answer on this topic
    F5
    Chose NGINX
    NGINX is more stable and scaleable than Imperva Application Delivery.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    48 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    98%
    Would buy again
    49 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    43 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    45 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    46 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    50 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    37 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    92%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    34 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    39 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    43 Answers
    Features
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Application FirewallNGINX
    Application Servers
    Comparison of Application Servers features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Imperva Application Firewall and NGINX
    Feature
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
    -
    Ratings
    Imperva Application Firewall
    -
    Ratings
    NGINX
    8.8
    43 Ratings
    10% above category average
    IDE support00 Ratings00 Ratings8.127 Ratings
    Security management00 Ratings00 Ratings8.638 Ratings
    Administration and management00 Ratings00 Ratings8.939 Ratings
    Application server performance00 Ratings00 Ratings9.139 Ratings
    Installation00 Ratings00 Ratings9.040 Ratings
    Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings00 Ratings9.037 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Application FirewallNGINX
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Azure Application Gateway
    Score8.8 out of 10
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    Oracle WebLogic Server
    Score7.3 out of 10
    Enterprises
    NetScaler
    Score8 out of 10
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    Red Hat JBoss EAP
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Application FirewallNGINX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.6
    (49 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.3
    (72 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.7
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    9.5
    (27 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.3
    (25 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Imperva Application FirewallNGINX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    F5
    I mean the only reason we changed away from it was price and it just simply had to do with the licensing that Citrix was offering on the NetScalers. They had basically an all you can eat consumption license that we were easily inside of with all of our VDI usage, whereas with F5 we had to buy the hardware and we had to license the software. Any place you need to actually do traffic balancing at scale, it's a fantastic product. I couldn't recommend it highly enough. There's just some things that hardware SSL offload and hardware load balancing just simply can't be equal that I don't know if there's a better product on the market for that.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    Incapsula as a Web Application Firewall is fantastic and very well priced compared to other products in the market. Load balancing supports management of multiple development and live environments, rewrite rules and behaviour rules to migrate traffic between sites and allow switching between different endpoints. The reporting features allow you too see the level of traffic instantly
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    F5
    • Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    • Security
    • Reporting
    • Oversight
    • Redirections
    • Rules
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    F5
    • Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    • The portal has recently been redesigned, finding previous sections will take time to familarise
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    • 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.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    F5
    F5 has always been one of the best products we have in the data center. We had few issues with the BUG and Code upgrades but the main use cases for F5 was always top notch. From High availability to Globally load balancing applications across multiple data centers and muti cloud environments.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    Great value for the product
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    F5
    I am very comfortable with this product not only configuring it but automating it as well. There are not many configurations or situations where I do not know how to implement it on the device. I find it straightforward and easy to use.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    F5
    Good after sales support if one purchased direct support from F5.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    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
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    F5
    Easy to implement if one had attended F5 Training for Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    F5
    F5 is doing its specialized function. There is no other product that can beat them. We are extremely happy with the product. Especially on load balancing, traffic redirecting TLS encryption, and SNI modification. We will continue to explore F5's product, especially on the public cloud side. e.g. NGINX.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    When going out to market we reviewed several products to compare. What we discovered was that Incapsula offered the best value and everything that we needed for a business of our size. We are able to "bolt on" bandwidth and functionality as the requirement grows, or scale down if no longer required.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    F5
    • It has allowed us to let application developers know that the issues are with their application and not due to the network, because of where it sits. This has been invaluable when troubleshooting issues when they arise. Knowing whether or not traffic is even hitting the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), either ingress or outgoing. If the Dev's information is not even making it to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), we can quickly tell them and let them figure the issue out on their own, saving the rest of the Network Team from getting that 2am call.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Imperva, a Thales company
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    • By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
    • Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
    • Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    NGINX Screenshots

    Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration