Citrix Gateway vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Citrix Gateway is a reliable remote access and remote desktop solution. It comes with some amazing security features and enables teams to work remotely. In addition, it guarantees easy, secure access to business apps and desktops through features such as SSO and MFA. It is an ideal tool to have if your business has remote teams.

Incentivized

Imperva web application firewall does a great job in giving us control over access to our public web servers. With our regular hosting provider, we couldn't block access based on geography, or really anything. So we had to rely on traditional access controls to protect the data. But with the WAF, we can block countries such as North Korea, or we could stop any SQL Injection attempts, or even do a temporary block of IP in the case of detected brute-forcing.

• It simplifies IT management - has greatly reduced our IT administrative burden.
• It enhances contextual access and security. Policy-based access helps improve security by considering location, device, and user identity.
• Unified access and performance. The tool ensures a single point of entry for all applications.

Incentivized

• Alert Aggregation - Correlates different violations into perceived correlated attacks.
• Ease of deployment - as one of the only WAFs that allow bridge mode deployment, this can be deployed with without downtime and no Network Architecture modifications. If the need for proxy is required at a later time, Transparent Reverse Proxy can be deployed within seconds and minimal configuration.
• Custom Policies - Custom security policies are easy to configure.
• Reporting - There are a good amount of pre-configured reports available by default.

Incentivized

• Opening of apps - it often crashes. My coworker even told me a trick to 'spam click' the app when it shows a certain error to be able to bypass it to get the app open.
• Ability to customize from a user point of view - hiding apps, customizing visual, etc.
• Desktop version never remaining signed in (MacBook) - much easier to just access via web.
• After new laptop/new hire logs into the web version of Citrix and downloads the launcher, the launcher should then auto-fill the URL rather than requesting it again.
• Citrix seems to reset at 12:00pm EST every day, given 15 minute reminder before shutting down the app. It would be great if this timer could be visible in the corner, or simply scheduled for different times depending on regions as it's quite disruptive.
• Citrix seems to reset at 12:00pm EST every day, given 15 minute reminder before shutting down the app. It would be great if this timer could be visible in the corner, or simply scheduled for different times depending on regions as it's quite disruptive.

Incentivized

• The UI can use a little work (but is largely decent)

Citrix is a visually very clean platform, allowing for ease of use from even the least tech-savvy. That being said, the apps crashes a lot (scheduled or otherwise), and apps very often refuse to open from the dashboard, making for a frustrating/confusing experience from those who have not yet experienced these same issues daily for years now. The launcher app (for MacBook) leaves a lot to be desired in terms of both setup and daily use, making the web version more viable. First-time users are also often confused on what Citrix is - and how each app connects in order to open a program (explaining "log into Citrix on the web, then download the launcher app, then launch the Spectra app via Citrix web, which will open in the Citrix launcher app on your laptop to launch the app, but you have to paste in the URL again and log in again to access" is a handful)

Incentivized

There are just a couple of points that are hard to find, that probably could be elsewhere. But these are minor; everything else is right where you'd expect it to be.

Support is pretty good and pretty fast to respond. I can't say I can really complain about the support experience I've had with them, as they've resolved issues within a reasonable time-frame. Of course, they could always be faster and better, but I think for what we pay, it's well worth the money.

Incentivized

We haven't needed support from Imperva since implementation. But during that time, their personnel were very quick to respond to questions. Since then, it's been largely doing its thing for us (which is exactly what we'd hoped).

We chose Citrix Netscaler Gateway for its wide market presence and its great experience over time. Although the implementation time may be longer than in the other solutions, I think the results are better and it allows configuration with greater capacity than the others. The cost is similar in all the solutions seen.

Incentivized

Ultimately, it was the easiest to work with that was still a "known" company (we've been burned too many times by up-and-comers). We needed something that gave us a lot of control but then didn't need its handheld on a daily basis. Imperva gives us a lot of that and we are still able to navigate it with ease.

• We use Citrix Gateway as booking tool which is important to us.
• We check our metrics using Citrix which is also important to the company as our performance.
• We can see also comments and opinions of the customers using this tool.

• Meet compliance requirements - Check.
• Better Insight into web application - Absolutely great, checks all the traffic against RFC standards and will alert on common development mistakes that duplicate application traffic or provide attack vectors for potential attackers.
• Have had several issues blocking a customer without producing alerts, while it happened only one week out of 2 years of working with the devices, it did produce a lot of headaches.

Incentivized