Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) Reviews

We have two primary use cases of this solution. One, the final users use their main interface to log in to the system. The Citrix team publish all the applications they are accessing with their laptops. We have an end terminal that is a small PC with just access to Citrix, so they don't have a real PC.

The other use case is my personal use case. I use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to access the network to jump into the infra. I am using it to access the network and to go through the infrastructure level for monitoring. I do not use the business application as I am from IT, we just support the IT infrastructure.

Centralization and security are the most valuable features of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. You have a controlled environment that doesn't allow your employees to install software on the machines and connect to the network. It is more secure than personal laptops everywhere.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is easy to manage. Our organization has a hybrid environment. We have a large percentage of our users that have their own laptops, which requires a lot of effort to manually maintain support, update and patch. With Citrix, we have three or four people that work on the infrastructure to support over 2,000 users.

The solution works as it is designed to work. However, when you are at the office you do need to log in and load your profile, which takes time. But that is the way it is designed.

I have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for four years.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is very stable. It is our responsibility to have it up and running with good performance. The environment is very stable. Any impact on Citrix is immediately reported to the users. We are always one step ahead in checking performance and getting alerts.

Any issues we have are small and resolved quickly by our team. 

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a complex solution. It requires many licenses in a big environment. Anyone considering the solution needs to assess and analyze the cost benefit. As a VDI solution, I do believe it is the best one out there.

I would rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop an eight out of 10.

Citrix Workspace can be deployed in the cloud and on-premise.

Citrix Workspace can present desktop applications with ease, in an efficient and secure manner. The performance is good, it is a great piece of software.

Citrix Workspace can improve by being more secure, but this would apply to any solution not only Citrix Workspace.

There are times when the Citrix client is updated with a poor release. The update can effectively knock out aspects that were working previously. You can go one step forward, but two steps back. They will go through a period of having some very good software releases and then they will stop completely. It will take a couple more releases to get back everything that was negatively impacted. 

I have used Citrix Workspace within the last 12 months.

The solution is stable.

Citrix Workspace is scalable.

I have not had to contact the support from Citrix Workspace.

The initial setup is straightforward and simple.

The licensing of Citrix Workspace is worth it. However, it is expensive. Citrix is probably more competitive now than VMware, but it is still a costly solution.

I have evaluated VMware.

My advice to others is the initial installation is always straightforward, it's the second phase that you need a lot of good assistance or a lot of assistance to get it working right or working well. If you go into it thinking you can learn as you go, it's not that kind of solution. It is similar to VMware. The whole element about it is that installing the solution is easy and getting things up and running is not a problem, but getting it to work well in the environment requires a lot of expertise and you need to pay the money to get that to work well.

I rate Citrix Workspace a ten out of ten.

I am using Citrix Workspace when I work from home. I use Citrix to remote in.

Since COVID, we are able to work. That is how half the state is functioning right now, is through remoting in through Citrix Workspace.

The most valuable feature is connectivity. The remote connection is the reason we are using this solution.

We have other in-house software that we use to fix our issues.

This solution is resource-intensive, it takes a lot of Bandwidth and a lot of the resources of the server.

In the next release, I would like to see it support dual monitors.

I have been using Citrix Workspace for the last seven months, since March.

We are using the latest version and we just completed an upgrade.

I support the helpdesk and use this solution to remote into other users' PCs to help them with their issues, such as word processing, email issues, and things of that nature.

It's stable, providing you have the bandwidth to run it. Also, it depends on your internet provider.

It's not really glitchy. It's just that if you have the bandwidth to run it.

We have at least 25,000 to 30,000 users using it in this state.

We have directors, we have nurses, and we have doctors. We even have our state schools on it. It's like everybody that works for the state is using it.

It's a scalable solution, I have no issues with it.

I have never had to use technical support.

I have never used another solution. This is the first time we've ever had this situation come up, and the first time that I've ever had to work from home and remote in.

The initial setup was pretty easy. 

All that you have to do is download the Workspace app to your home computer, and you have to load the receiver onto your work computer and connect.

For others who are interested in using this solution, I would say try it, go with it. It's not a bad product. Just make sure that you have the bandwidth to run it, and a decent PC, because it is resource-intensive.

I would rate Citrix Workspace a nine out of ten.

We use the platform to manage apps and virtual desktops.

The product has reasonable licensing costs for hardware. It has the best remote working features. It helps us easily use and manage machines with system policies and other aspects.

We encounter compatibility issues related to hardware, scanners, and other devices. There could be web control management features and persistent VDA.

We have been using Citrix DaaS for eight years.

It is a stable platform.

It is a scalable product.

We evaluated Horizon Cloud a few years ago. Back then, we found Citrix had higher capabilities than Horizon. Thus, we went with Citrix. However, it is providing better services now.

I rate Citrix DaaS an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for remote desktop access. 

The solution is deployed on the Citrix cloud.

The App is the most valuable feature.

Citrix should consolidate the multiple tools currently required into a single platform. At present, to access all the features, I need to log in to four separate locations and use four distinct tools.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is affordable.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

We've hybrid workers who work from home up to three days a week or four days a week in some cases. The staff is basically using Citrix as a solution to access all of the data and apps that they would need in order to do the work they do. We've got mostly data workers and analyst types working in our group. Others within the hospital use it for different purposes. I use it occasionally when I'm working from home or remotely. I'm not a frequent user like my staff.

It has given us access remotely. I work at a hospital. So, we had rules about limiting access to the hospital site for people who didn't need to be here to basically safeguard our clinical staff and other staff from exposure to COVID. It was a call to action to ensure that as many staff as possible could work from home safely. We were able to continue our operations relatively uninterrupted using Citrix. Since that time, we still have some restrictions in place, but we're pivoting back to hybrid work over the last year or so, and we'll likely continue that in the future.

Getting access to the applications for which we otherwise have to be on-site is probably the biggest advantage.

We're running into all kinds of speed issues and reliability issues. There are frequent disconnects, and we're not sure whether that's a problem with the product, with the way the product has been deployed, or with server capacity or bandwidth. Our IT department pays attention to that, but we are feeling the impact of that. 

It also gets a little dodgy when we're having to work remotely. We don't necessarily have all of the full functions that we would have with some of our in-hospital systems. There are times when we have gaps, but that's simply because our IT department hasn't set up all of the applications that we would normally have access to. So, that's not a Citrix problem as much as it is the way it has been deployed.

We're pivoting away from Workspace. We're being told we're going to get some of the newer, more robust tools that Citrix offers. That's where we're heading right now. We're not quite sure. We're hopeful that it's going to make some significant improvements for us and make work quite a bit easier, but we'll wait and see.

We've been using various versions of it for a number of years. We transitioned to Workspace at the start of COVID. There were some upgrades done.

Based on the deployment we have, I would rate it a six out of ten.

Our IT department would know about its scalability.  In our organization, I don't know the number of users we have, but I know that in our department, we have 17 people using it. We've got 3,000 staff and about 2,000 workers every day. Probably 200 or so are working remotely right now. 

We don't deal with technical support ourselves. We use our own. Our IT department provides tech support for us.

I've personally used some VPN solutions in the past. I know our IT department uses a VPN solution, but I don't know which one it is.

I didn't set it up. In terms of its deployment model, it's on-premises. We're running it on virtual servers in our office. It is on our server farm here.

I would imagine it was implemented in-house. We don't usually use third parties for doing that sort of work.

I would advise being mindful of what you need and ensuring that the functionality that you need is built into it, and the tool is capable of providing it. I would also advise ensuring that the deployment addresses it so that you're not left with missing functionality. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

The challenges we were looking to deal with by using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops were: How do we protect our data and how do we make sure that our data is not leaked out? We have deployed Citrix for most of our critical applications so that our users are using the Citrix VDI.

We have deployed it for a small number of users, between 1,500 and 2,000. To deploy it, we are using some Cisco hardware that we had available and some of the existing hardware within our data center. We have it on the web right now, but going forward, we are also moving some of their solution to the cloud.

We are using the application virtualization capabilities, on-premise desktop virtualization, cloud-hosted desktop virtualization, remote PC and physical desktop access.

The solution simplifies adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. Overall, from a cyber security point of view, in terms of data leakage as well as patches and upgrades that are required to be deployed to multiple endpoints, Citrix makes it very simple. That clearly helps in terms of mitigating risks at a very early stage.

The security of our intellectual property and data is enhanced because of the roles we have defined very precisely. People only have access to the data they are supposed to have access to.

The most valuable features of Citrix are the remote desktop advantages and the remote desktop environment for our remote users.

When it comes to the security and protection of critical business applications and desktops, it works very well. We were able to achieve what we were looking to do using the Citrix solution. It provides all of the features required for the protection of data. For example, we don't want to allow any copy/paste of data to an outside environment, and we are able to restrict the VDI to not allow any data transfer from the VDI to the local laptop's hard drives. That is one of the greatest advantages the solution provides. We also lock the USB.

We get complete control using the single, cloud control pane of Citrix. Using it, we can control the deployment of VDIs, which helps.

There is room for improvement because it has a lot of dependency on Active Directory and other things. If they could come up with something similar and native, a complete solution portfolio would help.

We have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for about one year.

As of now, we don't have any plans to increase our usage. Our consumption has been good during COVID, but we have been able to achieve what was required from our existing licenses.

There were some issues initially, in terms of the requirements, and there were some delays.

We did not have a previous solution.

Once we entered into an agreement to use the service, it took three to four months before we could start using it. The initial setup at our end to use the service took about a month to a month and a half. It was complex to some extent in our scenario, but as we worked on it and did a deep dive, we were able to do what was required for the deployment.

In general, they met our expectations for services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec.

We had our enterprise architect team and the project teams deploying the solution, as well as the respective business people who would be working very closely with their end-users. It was a team of 45 to 50 people. For maintenance, we have administrators as well as people who handle the required setup for the environment and who do troubleshooting.

We had help from a Citrix partner. From a project management standpoint, I would rate them at eight out of 10. The project management resources are not available from Citrix itself. They have to rely on partners and, sometimes, the partners also have to rely on the OEM.

The prices quoted initially were on the very high side, and there was room for negotiations, considering the competition and the options that are available directly from Microsoft now. The Microsoft options were not that mature at the time we were looking for a solution.

We looked at other solutions to some extent, but Citrix had already been in the market for a long time, so we started using Citrix. 

Citrix does not have its own hypervisor and VMware was very close competition. It would have also been a good, equivalent choice and there would not have been a problem using it. Then we looked at the financials and that aspect was left to the procurement department for negotiations. Overall, we gave a slightly higher rating to the VMware product, but senior management said that they would like to go with Citrix.

My advice would be to look at the options available and at your specific requirements. You need to find the best match for the overall integration of your ecosystem in terms of how it is with Office 365. And you may be using multiple SaaS solutions. The product you choose should be able to match all of those requirements.

The biggest lesson is that, during COVID, Citrix has come in handy for us for working remotely. It's a good solution.

The solution provides the flexibility of being used on most devices, but not on every device. It covers 80 to 85 percent of devices. In terms of the user experience, when we asked employees to work on the VDI, they were not entirely happy, considering the performance compared with a normal laptop or a desktop. But overall, the user experience is good, an eight or 8.5 out of 10.

The solution has enabled us, as an organization, to embrace thin-client computing, but I wouldn't say we have seen savings as a result. Citrix cannot function alone for organizations that have Office 365 deployed. Office 365 forces you to pay for a lot of other solutions and services that Citrix also has to rely on.

We deliver mainly desktops to all of our offices, using thin clients. Since we've been working from home during the pandemic, people just use their home computers to access their desktops. We deploy a desktop full of a standard set of applications, and we have a few published applications that are not on a desktop. People access those from that desktop, and some people access them as a published application and not a desktop.

We have people who have laptops and some of them just use one or two applications, so they don't get a full desktop. They'll just VPN from their laptop and use Citrix to access those few applications.

The following represent how Citrix technology is leveraged in our organization: application virtualization capabilities, on-premise desktop virtualization, and Remote PC access or remote access to physical desktops. We don't do the latter a lot, but we do publish remote desktop as a published application. Some use remote desktop to get back to their machines. We don't use the remote PC functionality. I wish we did, personally, but those are decisions that unfortunately get made elsewhere, and RDP was chosen versus publishing them as an ICA app to people.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provides the flexibility of being used on any device, which makes it easier to work for many anywhere. The transition from people working in an office every day to working from home was seamless, for the most part for us, because almost everybody has a personal computer, whether it's a PC or a Mac. We had a lot of people go out and buy Chromebooks and any other type of device that they saw fit for themselves. They just logged in to our portal and launched their desktops, like they always would. It's very flexible.

The biggest benefit was when we had that transition when offices were closed due to the pandemic. We had thin clients in the offices, so people were already using Citrix whether they were in the office or not. The flexibility provided by that alone was invaluable, in just getting people able to work from home. That's what the product is supposed to do. We didn't really have work-from-as a model. People could do it, but it wasn't a big thing for us. It was more along the lines of when you were done for the day you went home, and if you had to log back in, you could. But for the most part, people were done with work until the next day.

Citrix also plays a part in our business continuity strategies. We have in-house applications and, since we have data centers in various regions, we need the ability for a given application to be live in other data centers, even though we only currently have it running from one. vSphere is the platform that we use for virtualization so we have infrastructure that's the same in every data center. We have a Citrix environment just for DR that we can copy our vDisks into, in Provisioning Services, from one data center to the next. We can then just spin up a Citrix desktop that has access to that DR environment. The other teams then spin up their pieces of infrastructure within that DR bubble and test it. Citrix gives people the ability to quickly get into that DR environment once it has been stood up.

Another aspect is that the solution has resulted in IT efficiencies because we can be pretty agile with quickly reverting changes and quickly implementing new changes. It provides a lot of flexibility for us.

The Provisioning Services are the most valuable feature. We have Premium licensing, so Provisioning Services is huge for us, along with the Virtual Apps and Desktops part. It allows us to have a vDisk for every region, one that can easily be copied between them if we need to, to limit the amount of updates we have to do. 

The ability to deploy shared, hosted desktops and published applications, is also important.

And I would rate the user experience, when using the solution’s technology remotely, as high as it can be. We have offices all over the world, and some of them are in areas that have absolutely terrible internet service. For users in those areas, while we do get complaints that the experience is bad, on most days it's tolerable, and that's even on the bad days when there is extremely high latency. Especially not knowing where people are going to be working from, I would say the user experience is very good.

When it comes to the solution’s centralized policy control, as in the policies you apply to ICA sessions and session hosts or virtual desktop agents, you can control those through group policy, in addition to group policy, or put them in from the console. But either way, as a central management point for the Citrix sessions, in general, it's very good. It gives us flexibility. For example, with the users who are in the bad internet service areas, those policies give us the flexibility to lower their user experience, to dim down the graphics and sound quality. We can do that on-the-fly when they report problems. That generally helps their experience a little bit. So the policy control is good.

And if you have the full line of Citrix products deployed—NetScaler, MAS, all of those items tied together—the visibility is second to none from a monitoring perspective. We use the NetScaler and the MAS and the data that comes through there is almost invaluable, if you have the licensing to use it.

In addition, the security of your intellectual property and data when remote employees are using Citrix, is very high because, with Citrix you can limit access to the local device and access to the network, so you can't copy files if you have certain policies set between the Citrix session and the endpoint. You can prevent printing. You can prevent any data from ever leaving that desktop. And if you're licensed for it, which we are not, they've recently added the ability to watermark screenshots and to have keylog protection in Citrix sessions. If you're licensed for it, that's just an added bonus to the security features that are built-in by default.

The version of Director we're on, the 1912 version, has improved some of the monitoring capabilities that went back to what EdgeSite used to be as a product, when it comes to real-time analytics. If anything could be improved, it might be some of the Director functionality, and some of the dashboard customization, or the overall Director customization. We're limited in what we do. We use Director, as administrators, more than the service desk does, and we limit their access to Director to a few screens. They don't even get to see the full scope of what we see in there. Director is one thing that could be improved upon.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for about 10 years. My first experience with any type of virtualization technology was with Citrix. My first helpdesk job was supporting a company that deployed Citrix applications specifically, not desktops. I started out doing it from a support perspective and then got into the administration and engineering side, at that same place. I've never worked on any other products like Citrix.

I would rate the stability very highly, as high as it can be, due to my long-term experience with the product and how it's evolved to the point that it's at. That rating is based on my firsthand knowledge and experience of seeing it used and implemented, day in and day out, not only here, but at other places I've been that are larger than where I am now. I have a high opinion of it in general. It's been my career choice to work specifically with Citrix products.

It scales very well. The limitations we face are our own hardware constraints, because we purchase what we need and we don't generally provide much overhead. Our scalability problems come from limitations on hardware purchases, probably due to budget. If our company doubled in size, we would not have a problem scaling what we have today to meet that. We could probably do it in a couple of days and be just as fine.

We're licensed for 3,000 users. Our primary usage is in the U.S. and the AMEA region. We have about 2,400 users in that region who are active on it at any given time. The rest of those licenses are used in the Asia Pacific region. They're not as active in Citrix because a lot of their stuff is not as centralized as our other infrastructure is. They still don't use a lot of the same stuff. But they do use Citrix for email and for a couple of other things.

We haven't used them recently, but I generally have a high opinion of Citrix technical support. They have the knowledge and give us access to the expertise. I've worked with them in the past on a lot of things and, in some instances, if not for working with them, some of the problems we faced wouldn't have been solved. We didn't have access to anyone else with that level of knowledge.

I just started here about a year ago, but I was involved in setting up the 1912 environment. The process was straightforward. While they've changed the product names over the years, the underlying architecture and the technology, for the most part, has remained the same. I know there have been technological advancements and changes in the underlying architecture, but the overall end result, and some of how it does things, has remained the same. The setup was very easy for me and I think it would be easy even for somebody who is slightly new to the product.

Our most recent deployment did not take long at all. The longest part of it was the formal requests to the other teams and having them provision the virtual machines that we requested for the infrastructure. The longest thing about the deployment for us is getting to the point where we're comfortable putting a desktop out there for user consumption. It's getting them to test and validate that we built that desktop the same as the current one they're using. It's not so much that the deployment takes long because of any Citrix product problems. It's more due to user acceptance testing of the functionality of the desktop itself and the software we use.

Four or five people are involved in deployment, between the ones on our team who build, install, and configure the various infrastructure pieces, and the people that we make requests to who build the database servers and the other virtual machines.

We deploy according to the best practices. We don't follow any specific guides, but we deploy with the minimum specs, plus what we know we need to scale for the user base that we have.

We did it ourselves.

Citrix provides everything in one integrated platform—even the lowest licensing version. It depends on your needs. But if you have the Premium Edition, it provides absolutely every tool you could need to virtualize and deploy.

I'm not involved with the licensing, purchasing, or cost-comparison types of discussions. I'm primarily on the technical side. But I would imagine the integrated platform plays a large part in providing value. Citrix is a leader in this space. Our company has to see some value in the product to pay for it as it is. I would always advocate for it over other similar products.

If you're looking at implementing it, plan as best you can at all levels. Citrix has its consulting methodology for how to properly plan and deploy an environment. I've been in a lot of places where I haven't seen the planning phase happening. Planning goes a long way towards a successful deployment, because you test a lot of things during the testing phase of that, in particular. You see things that you wouldn't otherwise see if you just built it and threw it out there and said, "Hey, use this." You would run into a lot of problems that you wouldn't understand, things that need to be tweaked for any deployment, no matter where you're deploying it. There is a set of standard things that you need to do. Planning goes a long way towards making sure that it's not only accepted by your end users but that it's supportable.

Access control comes into play because we have different Citrix environments for different regions and they don't really cross-talk. We do limit certain things to certain environments, or some things are only available from one environment. People from the other environments have to access it from a different environment, but to them it's seamless because they're all behind the same store-front environments.