F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Score

8.5 out of 10

Reviews

15 Reviews

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management Facelift

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

March 13, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I currently use this product for SSL certificate management and a tool to use for discovery when I am needing to research a VIP, cert, pool or profile. It is essential to my everyday workload.

Pros

Easy to search what you are looking for
Certificate management
Health checks when deployments are pushed

Cons

Automation, specifically when it comes to pinning policies
Auto detect issues like a LTM's name not matching the physical LTM

Likelihood to Recommend

I feel when this product gets an uplift into Insights it will be much better

Kristen McGee

Network Engineer in Information Technology at HCA (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

March 12, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Was intending to use as the product name suggests, that being a Central Management tool, to support a few hundred BIG-IP devices, including centralized SSL/TLS certificate management, configuration management, backups, licensing, etc.

Pros

backups
license management

Cons

ability to easily push configuration changes to managed devices
platform is not very user friendly when it comes to trying to save and re-use configurations deployment jobs; they must be re-created every time even though you are trying to execute the same job.

Likelihood to Recommend

Centralized license management and backups work fine; however, I have found the rest of the product too clunky or cumbersome or incapable of doing other centralized management tasks.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management review

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

March 12, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it fairly minimally. we use it for licensing and capturing backups. haven't had a lot of luck doing much else with it.

Pros

licensing

Cons

cumbersome interface
not intuitive
things don't always work well

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for licensing.

Mike Runge

F5 Service Owner in Information Technology at Eli Lilly and Company (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

Solid with a room for improvement.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 12, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management as a license manager until we changed to FCP where the licensing is directly in the cloud now. Aside from that to monitor VDI sessions into our Citrix environment and for automation, upgrades and mainly pushing scripts to our BigIP fleet.

Pros

License mgmt
automation
upgrades

Cons

RBAC
Very granular access to resources - menus
Object management
Monitoring

Likelihood to Recommend

To deploy and remove licenses, to be a bridge for automation and upgrade mgmt

Ivan Gutierrez

Network Engineer Sr. in Information Technology at Vw Credit, Inc (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

March 12, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management is Easy to deploy and admin

Pros

backup

Cons

Features for pushing configuration down to BigIP needs improvement.

Likelihood to Recommend

If asked, I think I am likely to tell a colleague that, in my experience, F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management is Good to backup and restore config of F5 Big IP APM. However, in my opinion, F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management is not so great for managing individual APM.

Verified User

Contributor in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Not what we had hoped for

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

March 12, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Mainly inventory, license management, and certificate management. F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management helps us maintain an inventory of our BIG-IP estate. Additionally, it offers our other teams the ability to query the estate to find what devices host which configurations.

Pros

Inventory
Certificate Management
Licensing

Cons

pushing configurations to devices
re-using configuration options, like profiles

Likelihood to Recommend

The F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management is really great for keeping archives of configurations of all managed devices. It's not so good at deploying those configurations across environments

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

25 years of experience

BIG-IQ

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

March 11, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize BIG-IQ to manage several BIG-IP deployments for several clients through our MSP practice. The platform continuously breaks and has to be fixed. We find ourselves spending more time fixing BIG-IQ than using it to deploy config changes to BIG-IPs.

Pros

SSL Certificate Management
UCS Backup Orchestration
QKview Orchestration

Cons

Upgrade of the BIG-IQ platform has never worked well, require command line intervention to complete the upgrade process.
CPB constantly hangs, requiring restarts or reboots.
Does not support FQDN nodes.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is helpful in large scale environments to orchestrate UCS backups and QKviews, as well as centralize TLS/SSL Certificate Management.

Verified User

Vice-President in Engineering (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

10 years of experience

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management support ending

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

February 28, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We found that because we are looking at moving to next and there seems to be a move away from F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management the product has a limited lifetime and I feel is not worth putting the time into at this time.

Pros

It show us all F5s in one spot
It is able to take backups
It can help with upgrades
Give central spot to make reports

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Since it has a very limited lifetime, I would say goto central manager or load a CE to have that as your 1 pain of glass and look for another management solution.

Robert Carney

IT in Corporate at Cigna (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

13 years of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management is nice, but not critical

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

February 28, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We put F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management in our environment to use its centralized management capabilities, but we don't make much use of it. It is part of our certificate renewal and deployment process, but doesn't add much to our Big-IP administration. Maybe we're using it wrong.

Pros

Deployment and change tracking

Cons

For small, quick changes it just seems to add more steps and time to the process

Likelihood to Recommend

For deploying virtual servers from scratch it works well and gives detailed tracking on the changes made. For small temporary updates, like enabling/disabling pool members, it actually slows down the process.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management - It Could Have Been Great

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

February 28, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, We backup VELOS, and BIG-IPs, and have LTM objects in silos. We use F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management to run a second site.

Pros

Nothing
Very Little
Even less

Cons

Everywhere
F5OS compatibility
BIG-IP Next Support

Likelihood to Recommend

If asked about F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management, I think I am likely to tell a colleague that, In my opinion, nothing works well and there are frequent gotchas to implementing features.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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