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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. Sauce Labs

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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

    Sauce Labs

    Score6.8 out of 10
    N/ASauce Labs is a cloud-based platform for automated testing of desktop and mobile applications. It is designed to be instantly scalable, since it is optimized for continuous integration workflows. (The vendor says that when tests are automated and run in parallel on multiple virtual machines across many different browser, platform and device combinations, testing time is reduced and developer time is freed up from managing infrastructure.) The Sauce Labs testing cloud is intended to be paired…

    $19

    per month

    Pricing
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Sauce Labs
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Live Testing
    $19.00
    per month
    Virtual Cloud
    $149.00
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Sauce Labs
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details—Free service available for Open Source projects.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Sauce Labs
    Considered Both Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Sauce Labs
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    48 Answers
    90%
    Would buy again
    19 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    43 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    19 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    46 Answers
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    20 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    37 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    11 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    39 Answers
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    18 Answers
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    User Ratings
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Sauce Labs
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.6
    (49 ratings)
    5.6
    (158 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.7
    (2 ratings)
    9.3
    (20 ratings)
    Usability
    9.5
    (27 ratings)
    8.4
    (20 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.3
    (15 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.5
    (6 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (3 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (4 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (4 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)Sauce Labs
    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
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    Sauce Labs
    Having used some of the competitor's tools over the year I would say that SauceLabs provides a lot of value for money if you plan to run long sets of tests with high frequencies. Paying for a single slot means you can run tests whenever you want without creeping costs but it does make running tests in parallel require an extra slot. Currently, our test suite takes over three hours to run and at the moment it is cost prohibitive to purchase an extra slot. However, having access to live testing and integration with Appium is great.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Sauce Labs
    • Provides a comprehensive selection of browser and platform versions for test automation and CI/CD pipeline support
    • Provides a rich selection of browser/platform availability for customer issue reproduction
    • Provides a comprehensive set of virtual mobile device configurations for automation and availability
    • Sauce Labs' SaaS and self service tools work and perform well
    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
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    Sauce Labs
    • I've had four changes in account managers over the past couple of years. They ranged from super experienced/advocate to some that seems relatively junior/a bit removed. I understand this happens but clarity on what I can expect with these partnerships would be valuable. What I've gotten in the end has varied dramatically.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Sauce Labs
    As we currently know, there's nothing on the market with a big feature set like saucelabs at their current price point. Along with the business not having to learn a whole new tool to use again and the ability to refresh our private devices and the continuously growing number of public devices available and features.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Sauce Labs
    It is an incredibly easy service to use for what its primary intention is. The only reason a point is deducted is because more feature enrichment can be done around the Sauce Connect Proxy utility and the Jenkins Sauce OnDemand plugin. User Account administration also needs more work, such as the addition of user groups, rather than a simple hierarchy of users.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Sauce Labs
    Yes, Sauce labs is always there, and it is easy to troubleshoot when you are having any connectivity issue, they always keep you informed when they plan to perform any type of maintenance window on their side in advance, so you can plan and will not affect your current work. I do not recall any outage.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Sauce Labs
    The time where they acquired TestObject and were trying to integrate their services would probably be the most annoying time. Annoying as features were in two separate places (websites) for example. But since the introduction of their unified platform, we haven't run into any issues as of yet and we've used them for at least 5-6 years now.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    F5
    Good after sales support if one purchased direct support from F5.
    Incentivized
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    Sauce Labs
    The people here are just so friendly and personable. For instance, Tristan Lombard answered every single email with a very cheery tone and not only did he diagnose my issue, he also made sure to ask how my day was going. Keep it up
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    F5
    Easy to implement if one had attended F5 Training for Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
    Incentivized
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    Sauce Labs
    I am not sure if it's my company that makes getting Sauce Labs integrated into the team difficult or is it Sauce Labs. The process for getting Sauce Labs for a project is quite a tedious process and the information for using Sauce Labs initially is quite lacking. There is little support for getting started
    Read full review
    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
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    Sauce Labs
    We have also tested out Browser Stack, which at the time was more geared towards manual testing. Although it appeared to support more mobile devices/browsers, we also wanted something that can plugin in easily with our existing Selenium test scripts. Sauce Labs was definitely more geared towards our goals at the moment which were to automation functional/regression testing and build it into our release pipeline.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    Sauce Labs
    With private devices, you have full reign over usage of them, so no complaints there. Public devices are available if no one else is using it, which is understandable. Browser VMs are based on number of open sessions and Saucelabs give you a certain number depending on what you need. If you need more, then you pay for more. It is as simple as that. You need more devices, then you can pay for more private ones too. A workaround for public devices is to pick the first available one and not be too picky, that's if you are able to of course.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Sauce Labs
    • Eh... Negligible? Being on AWS West makes it quite a few hops for us, so the process times out every now and again. That is frustrating.
    • I can't really speak to the dollars, as I am not privy to the information.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Sauce Labs Screenshots

    Screenshot of Sauce Labs UI optimized for continuous integration workflows.