F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF vs. NetScaler

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
F5 Networks offers the Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) to provide bot defense, advanced application protection, anti-bot SDK, and other features.N/A
NetScaler
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
NetScaler ADC is an application delivery controller.N/A
Pricing
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNetScaler
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNetScaler
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNetScaler
Best Alternatives
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNetScaler
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
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Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudflare
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Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.0 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNetScaler
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(11 ratings)
8.7
(25 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAFNetScaler
Likelihood to Recommend
F5
I believe that in industrial environments like ours where we have to have bare metal devices near the production environment combined with hybrid cloud, that is a good platform. That's a good use case. It optimizes traffic. It helps us stay more secure in our data centers. Now with regards to that are fully operating in the cloud, I'm not really sure if we would make the same decision considering the option that I said to have something that is self-provision to avoid too much management of virtual machines on the cloud. So that's an area of improvement.
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Citrix
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.
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Pros
F5
  • So the product definitely is helping us for sudden attacks through DDOS, some injection ingestion into UI URLs, and definitely it's capturing those and I definitely see that as an advantage for us. They can stop the hackers from using our endpoints.
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Citrix
  • 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.
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Cons
F5
  • The UI for events. E.g., clicking the "Accept" button does nothing.
  • Traffic learning suggestions are often very incorrect. We were originally suggested to use "Automatic" learning, and had to completely scrap the policy due to the suggestions.
  • "All in one" dashboard for viewing application URL/parameter overrides per policy.
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Citrix
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
We just love work with f5
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Citrix
No answers on this topic
Usability
F5
Most* of it is very intuitive and easy to use. The "Help" section is fairly fantastic. See some of my other comments about things like the "Traffic Learning" section being wildly wrong sometimes, and also the event logs with UI buttons that don't do anything. Overall though, it's an excellent product.
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Citrix
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.
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Support Rating
F5
No answers on this topic
Citrix
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.
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Alternatives Considered
F5
-Stable data path equals to less crashes -Almost all the features working as expected -Provides more granular controls in allowing false positives -Request evaluation is accurate -Irules feature is a plus
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Citrix
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
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Return on Investment
F5
  • In our case it has been great because the pricing is just right for all the features that we have on the platform and the flexibility. In fact, we acquired another license last year, so that's something that we're interested in. We are currently moving towards the cloud with our ERP systems and eliminating the IBM platform, so we would like to see that F5 virtual option available on Azure.
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Citrix
  • 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
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ScreenShots