F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
F5's BIG-IQ provides centralized management of app services and security policies.N/A
NGINX
Score 9.1 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-IQ Centralized ManagementNGINX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementNGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementNGINX
Features
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementNGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.8
43 Ratings
10% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings8.127 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.638 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.939 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings9.139 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.140 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings9.037 Ratings
User Ratings
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
4.2
(15 ratings)
9.3
(72 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.3
(1 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
4.4
(12 ratings)
8.3
(25 ratings)
Support Rating
6.4
(1 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
F5
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management works perfectly in Software upgrades and simple daily changes. We are successfully using it to create and or delete objects. It doesn`t works well when we need reports. I usually have to create custom scripts to get a list of objects, for example. Performance is also something that could be improved in Big-IQ
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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.
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Pros
F5
  • Common system level changes like cipher suite customization, ssh protocol settings etc can be pushed to all F5 gear through one click of a button
  • Enterprise standard templates for profiles/protocols etc., can be efficiently managed across F5 gear through a single interface
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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)!
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Cons
F5
  • There a lack of the going forward to next
  • The second site product does not do what we need and we are forced to write our own scripts
  • Many of the alerting that was in enterprise management is no longer in F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management
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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.
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
There is some room for improvement around RBAC. The access to certain features, options and menus is not straightforward and not that granular.
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F5
Great value for the product
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Usability
F5
I feel pinning policies are killing you guys when it comes to being able to add multiple LTMs that have different naming conventions.
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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
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Support Rating
F5
The support is a bit complex and not straightforward. It seems there aren't many engineers supporting this platform. There are many components in the solution that makes it complex for troubleshooting. Documentation needs to be more in depth, and I have opened a few cases around cluster sync issues and objects stalled. In the end I was able to find and fix the problem.
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
F5
Of all the centralized Management platforms I have ever used, BIG-IQ is the worst. It constantly breaks and requires fixing in some way or another.
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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
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Return on Investment
F5
  • Cut costs by requiring less manual hours to manage F5 OS installations
  • Great monitoring and alerting tool for general F5 gear health
  • Provides critical information for capacity planning of the F5 resources
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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.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

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