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Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs NGINX Plus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing enhances service availability and performance for high-traffic sites, with negligible costs and ROI improvements.
Sentiment score
7.4
NGINX Plus improved website speed, reduced costs, and enhanced application accessibility, offering varied returns despite higher costs than alternatives.
Elastic Load Balancing is a part of a total solution package.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing support is largely effective and helpful but would benefit from quicker initial response times.
Sentiment score
6.8
Most users rely on community resources and documentation, but those who use technical support rate it effective despite variable response times.
The support team has architects available.
The technical support is very responsive due to the prime-level support package.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing efficiently scales and manages traffic, offering reliable automatic scaling and multi-AZ deployment for varied demands.
Sentiment score
8.0
NGINX Plus is highly scalable, adaptable to configurations, and efficiently manages load balancing, especially on AWS or GCP.
Managing traffic load is efficient as Auto Scaling Group can easily be connected with ALB based on the number of requests.
While some people use NGINX for web servers, my current use case focuses on networking and tunneling, which does not necessitate much scaling.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is stable and reliable, with high ratings, occasional glitches, and benefits from Auto Scaling for uptime.
Sentiment score
7.9
NGINX Plus is stable and reliable with minor concerns, often attributed to configuration, performing well in production environments.
I require ninety-nine point nine percent uptime, and NGINX has been pivotal in helping me achieve this along with our other DNS services.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing needs better integration, quicker support, improved security, streamlined processes, and enhanced monitoring for optimized user experience.
NGINX Plus needs improvements in scalability, ease of use, pricing, performance, security integration, and standalone deployment options.
The ability to directly block specific IP addresses without additional service integration would be beneficial.
NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates.
As with any application, there were initial issues, however, after receiving support, everything was rectified.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing offers competitive pay-as-you-go pricing, with monthly costs between $18 to $30 and free tiers available.
NGINX offers a free version, while NGINX Plus requires a paid license with flexible, feature-based pricing options.
Pricing is okay, and Amazon has plans to reduce prices further.
Using ALB incurs a cost as opposed to the free open-source solutions like NGINX or HAProxy.
My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.
The solution offers a cost advantage.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing provides scalable, secure traffic management and integration with AWS services, featuring auto-scaling and high performance.
NGINX Plus provides efficient load balancing, caching, and security with high performance, modularity, and seamless integration for flexible traffic management.
Deploy our solution in multiple availability zones, it ensures that the system is always available and does not go down.
It is the de facto standard for AWS workloads and supports the AWS ecosystem seamlessly.
For API management, the WebSocket, and the WebServer, NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is 1.4%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 8.4%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

Mohd Farhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Manage complex traffic routing with ease and ensure system availability
The ELB would benefit from allowing deployment in a single availability zone for test servers to avoid unnecessary costs. Additionally, the ability to directly block specific IP addresses without additional service integration would be beneficial. Furthermore, sometimes ALB has a delay in recognizing the need to scale the system based on CloudWatch metrics, which could use improvement.
Ritesh-Bakhru - PeerSpot reviewer
Quick installation and very easy to manage while doing orchestration or automation
NGINX cannot be a replacement for your traditional load balancer with what we use in the network today. However, with applications going toward microservices, NGINX is definitely a way forward. F5 has many traditional load balancing features, so they still need to bring some of those features to NGINX. NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5. I think F5 is trying to implement those features in NGINX so they can improve the balancing on NGINX, but I think that will take some time. With the traditional F5 set up, the same OS can do load balancing, firewalls, and even policy enforcement. If we are able to bring some of those capabilities to NGINX, I think it would become a versatile solution and usage would definitely increase.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
56%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Government
3%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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?
Sometimes the target group takes too much time to configure or to be seen on the internet, especially when configuring through ISV tools.
What is your primary use case for Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?
Elastic Load Balancer is used to maintain requests and distribute traffic on target groups. The target could be any type of instances, IPs, or Lambda functions. Most of the time, the target group i...
Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?
IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architecture can handle the most demanding tasks. From media streaming to web applications,...
What do you like most about NGINX Plus?
It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?
My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.
 

Also Known As

No data available
NGINX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.