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. The BIG-IP suite of products supports a wide range of security and application performance needs. The suite includes BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) traffic management and optimization, BIG-IP DNS, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) identity and password protection, BIG-IP Application…
N/A
NGINX
Score 9.2 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
NGINX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BIG-IP
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
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 BIG-IP
NGINX
Considered Both Products
BIG-IP
Verified User
Engineer
Chose F5 BIG-IP
I used NGINX and Cloudflare CDN and now that F5 owns NGINX it’s been an easy switch. Cloudflare has a very intuitive platform that makes it easy to get up and running. Most of my experience is with F5 and I’m happy to say it’s made my experience streamlined enough that I …
Number of issues or errors are very small, F5 BIG-IP change OS/Firmware architecture to microservice run on the container to easy to maintain and upgrade. Good support from engineer teams. Security functions upgrade and F5 BIG-IP is one important component in F5 Platform …
We have multiple vendors in our environment. As we have a number of F5 devices already deployed keeping them fed and happy is a task. We continue with F5 as the data plane is solid and management tools are consistent with automation objectives.
I have configured Citrix, Kemp, and A10 load balancers professionally and the ease of use of F5 BIG-IP is far and away the easiest to use and most robust product out there for application delivery. The customization available with profiles and iRules make it a critical part of our data center infrastructure.
[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.
Logs - from time to time we have issues and having more specific logs regarding traffic failures would help.
Virtual server support for multiple nodes with different operating systems in a single pool. We tend to have issues with servers being two different versions of windows using the same VIP and traffic stops. Usually have to recreate the VIP, and pool and separate the nodes in separate pools by OS versions.
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.
I am a relatively new Networking personell and I found the F5 BIG-IP's we use for Load Balancing to be easy to understand and was able to quickly become more fluent in it. I have been in the position less than a year and have found myself able to quickly become the go to person for Load Balancing.
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.
On the occasions when we've had to engage f5 support, they have been great. They have always resolved our issues quickly and been easy to work with and professional. The reason I give them a 10 out of 10, however, is because when we've had issues that have crossed over between the f5 BIG-IP, our Cisco switches, and our Microsoft IIS server the f5 support representatives have been extremely knowledgeable about every product and device involved and have been able to troubleshoot end-to-end without having to engage other vendors.
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.
So the cloud versions, and admittedly we did not do the Imperva on-prem solution. We only went with cloud. There's a lot of idiosyncrasies, like you can't use real IP addresses, you must snap. And that caused us problems with DNS and DNS routing. So we had to turn on some features with F5 that did remediate the issue, like using the one connect profiles, but that did cause some other problems identifying traffic and we had to make some eye roll changes to use the exported four headers.
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
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.
