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.
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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
Score 9.7 out of 10
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F5 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.
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NetScaler
Score 7.9 out of 10
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NetScaler ADC is an application delivery controller.
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Pricing
F5 BIG-IP
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
NetScaler
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 BIG-IP
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
NetScaler
Free Trial
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Free/Freemium Version
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Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 BIG-IP
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
NetScaler
Considered Multiple Products
F5 BIG-IP
Verified User
Engineer
Chose F5 BIG-IP
F5 BIG-IP is years ahead in terms of features, support, etc compared to NetScaler ADC.
When comparing F5 BIG-IP to these products they do not offer half of the things F5 BIG-IP offers and in some situations I could not even get the app to work. With Azure App Gateway we needed to make specifics redirects to work but we never got it to work. With F5 BIG-IP we got …
F5 BIG-IP's iRules are way superior and robust. the biggest game changer was iRules. F5 also able to modify the responses from our application on different conditions. We have security vulnerability that we need to patch 500+ webservers. F5 came in and using iRules able to …
F5 interface is better and more user friendly and the technology is just better. F5 WAF is better and easier to integrate than Imperva WAF which I have seen introduce latency.
F5 BIG-IP Vs Netscaler Traffic Manager by Citrix I would say there is no comparison. Netscaler was difficult to use and no one easily understood the configurations. It led to many times where our engineers would need to reverse engineer the configuration before they could …
As a partner we had a better commercial undestading and a better experience with the product that the competitor, but, sill customer service have the improve.
SSLVPN on F5 works much better than IPSec on ASA. From the user's side, no configuration is required - the user can just install the VPN client, input the URL, and the F5 client does the rest. For ASA, profile installation or configuration is required, so the user must go to …
We combine the AWAF and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to not only deliver high performance apps but also secure the apps against so many kinds of threats.
Obviously NetScaler, because we had that functionality, we just turned it on. We were only using it for our Citrix farms and we migrated all of our F5 uses over to the NetScalers. So simply because that was, other than buying the product, which the actual NetScaler themselves …
The F5 LTMs integrate great with the F5 DNS appliances and makes on the fly decisions using iquery. We have two HA data centers that the F5 LTMs are used in and integrate great with teh F5 DNS servers.
Netscaler has more features than F5 BIG-IP APM product and easier to manage with friendlier user interface for network admins. It was more cost efficient as well and if you have a Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environment, it is more compatible with those products as well. Our …
Our organization replaced 5 BIG-IP appliances with Citrix ADC, both are comparable products. The largest advantage for our organization switching to Citrix ADC is the shared code base and reduction of the number of vendors in an implemented solution chain from end to end.
We chose Citrix ADC over Kemp and F5 due to additional integrations with various products such as Citrix/Horizon/Monitoring tools. We additionally chose ADC due to better ease of use and ability to have the appliances be virtual or physical, with the configuration being a …
Our company uses both Citrix ADC and F5 BigIP. This is mostly due to team preference. F5 seems to require the use of separate types of devices to do multi-site load balancing while Citrix ADC functionality is the same software on all devices you implement.
The Citrix NetScaler is the competitor to the f5 BigIP LTM/GTM. I've used both products extensively and the both have pros and cons against each other. F5 has better support and better documentation, and is purpose built for load balancing applications. The NetScaler has a more …
Citrix NetScaler seems to be a beast right away. Once you start testing and getting used to the logic that is in place, it becomes the obvious choice for selecting such appliance to be used in an enterprise setting.
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.
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.
Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.
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.
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.
Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin.
Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow.
Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood.
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.
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.
The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful.
Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security.
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
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.
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.
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.
I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.
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.
Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
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.
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.
easy to use and setup and reliable. Once the configuration was setup and running this has been really useful and easy to maintain. The other solutions seemed overly complicated and difficult to configure and get up and running with the security that we required
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
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.
We had this set up before COVID and it saved us. We just added user licenses and scaled out our citrix farm and IT sat back and just monitored users from home.
Scales up and out with ease
Challenging to find NetScaler experts for advanced features you want to enable and use
