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Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs NetScaler comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetScaler
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is 1.4%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetScaler is 15.6%, up from 13.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

Mridu Boruah - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool that offers its users resiliency, high availability, and a great scalability
It is a very scalable solution in which you can add more servers instantly. I rate the scalability of the product a nine out of ten. The solution can handle a lot of load, and you don't need to do anything since it will just scale up and down as and when the load increases or decreases, respectively. There are thousands of users of various applications, and whoever wants to use an application has to use a load balancer.
DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking
Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Security and monitoring for high-performance applications are some of the top features."
"Amazon Elastic Load Balancing has improved our application availability by routing client requests only to healthy EC2 instances."
"The most valuable feature is the Lambda function due to its utility with serverless technology."
"The feature that I like the most is the scalability. The solutions I build often have many pieces, which are very complicated. If a client comes to me with a design, my developer has made this as a template or a cloud formation script. It's a design on paper, and I want it executed a certain way. I can do that quickly and repeatedly with AWS. That is a considerable advantage because I can take that template and do it five times in different zones. That is an excellent feature based on a template, et cetera."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is scaling."
"The network load balancer is really fast."
"It has very good features. It is very configurable. Security with TLS, et cetera is also very easy."
"I appreciate the checks that Elastic Load Balancer performs with the instances to ensure they are running properly."
"Load Balancing and SSL offloading are key features."
"We appreciate that this solution facilitates our access to Citrix internet."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"The most impressive thing about Citrix ADM is that we don't encounter latency."
"The NetScaler appliance has provided a lot of customers with greater high availability for their enterprise applications within a single site and across multiple locations."
"Citrix Director has been great. It gives us one pane of glass to be able to monitor what's going on with the user sessions as well as to keep on top of the virtual desktops, any servers that may be offline or behaving suspiciously, or any troublesome spots like disconnections. We also use Citrix Studio for maintaining the actual servers that are hosting these applications. We use it for delivery groups in case we need to modify delivery groups in regards to which groups have access to which applications. It has been very helpful."
"Helped us a lot with load balancing."
"The GSLB feature allows us to move services between data centers. We can do this in either a planned or unplanned manner. We have experienced service provider outages at our primary data center and GSLB will kick in to automatically modify DNS records to point to a secondary data center (active/passive). We also make use of GeoIP information to point clients to the closest data center for accessing applications."
 

Cons

"We faced some issues with the health check."
"One issue that we faced with ALB was that leaf-level certificate validation was not happening. It is not that user-friendly in that aspect."
"Improvement is needed in the integration with Terraform, especially in writing scripts for creating load balancers and target groups."
"It would be good if we had a product that integrates well with third-party vendors. Some of our customers want a multi-cloud solution. They don't want to be tied up to or be in just one cloud."
"The machines created by Amazon Elastic Load Balancing have different IP addresses, which we are not able to whitelist or predict."
"The tool could enhance the internal load balancer with better health monitoring. The external load balancer needs more security parameters to protect it from the internet, as it currently lacks protection. It's okay for basic load balancing and those looking for basic functionality in an application load balancer. However, if someone is going to onboard a critical application, like in the banking sector, I wouldn't suggest Amazon Elastic Load Balancer because of security issues. There are no firewall restrictions."
"The routing policies and waiting policies could be improved for better performance."
"They could improve provisioning speed."
"Mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexity."
"The security is okay, but the monitoring and reporting need improvement."
"The solution's pricing is a big concern and should be improved."
"Technical support could be improved."
"I would like to see support for scripting, like "iRule", which gives you the option to implement any configuration which is not available out of the box."
"The solution can improve their support and send tickets directly to a Citrix ADC engineer in order to avoid having to escalate each support call."
"There are some features which are missing.​"
"The interface could be improved, some customers struggle with that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a yearly license."
"The cost for using the application load balancer is approximately $18 to $21 per month."
"The solution is expensive."
"The product is not cheap."
"I have no issues with the tool's pricing."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of connections one uses. It is a free tool for a certain amount of connections, which runs into thousands, and after that, there is a certain amount to be paid to Amazon."
"The solution's pricing is low and I rate it a nine out of ten."
"The solution's pricing is $30 per month."
"It's not for startups or SOHO."
"NetScaler does the same thing as an F5 and it's cheaper."
"The client pays for the Citrix NetScaler license annually."
"It is true that it is a bit pricey compared to newer technologies coming to the market. For example, A10 is a load balancer that does everything that Citrix can and it does a lot more than what NetScaler does when it comes to the security space, and their prices are so cheap. Every box comes with its own license and support built into it. When you compare that with NetScaler, you have to buy licenses separately, you have to buy a support agreement that is going to be separate. A small NetScaler, even if it is a VPX which is a virtual server, could cost you close to $150,000 to $200,000 dollars. So the pricing is really high."
"The firewall license is included by default, with no additional costs."
"I rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten since it is expensive."
"The license for Citrix NetScaler is on an annual basis and it is reasonably priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
59%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Government
3%
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing transfers the data securely from servers to users and splits the traffic based on peak times.
What needs improvement with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?
There aren't any major improvements needed; however, the latency compared to the network load balancer could be improved. Network load balancers are very fast in terms of latency, and improvements ...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?
I am currently working with AWS services including S3, CloudFront, EC2, Elastic Load Balancer, RDS databases, SNS, SQS, Lambda, and API Gateway. We use a round robin pattern to distribute the traff...
What do you like most about Citrix ADC?
The most valuable feature for us is the application firewalling in Citrix NetScaler, ensuring only valid traffic enters our environment.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADC?
After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more expensive.
What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?
Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexity. While it could be easier to manage, it is like transitioning from driving a ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. NetScaler and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.