DX Spectrum vs NetScaler comparison

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DX Spectrum

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

In the network monitoring and application delivery category, DX Spectrum and NetScaler both excel but in different areas. DX Spectrum demonstrates superiority with its deep integration capabilities and complete IT infrastructure insight, while NetScaler shows strong performance with flexible deployment and application security features.

Features: DX Spectrum is known for network monitoring abilities, scalability, and event correlation, seamlessly integrating with CA and third-party tools. Fault management and root cause analysis provide comprehensive IT infrastructure insights. In contrast, NetScaler focuses on application delivery, offering load balancing, SSL offload, and global server load balancing. Its flexible deployment model and advanced security features enhance network performance.

Room for Improvement: DX Spectrum users seek improvement in event configuration complexity and Java dependency, as well as a modernized interface and better product integration. NetScaler is critiqued for its high cost, complicated licensing, and occasional firmware issues. Users desire better customization, simpler documentation, and improved integration capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: DX Spectrum is mainly deployed on-premises, best suited for organizations with strong IT infrastructure, and offers generally good customer service but inconsistent technical support post-Broadcom acquisition. NetScaler offers diverse deployment options, including on-premises, private, and public clouds, with high customer service ratings but initial setup challenges due to product complexity.

Pricing and ROI: DX Spectrum's pricing tends to be high, benefiting large enterprises with its extensive features, although smaller companies may find it costly. It offers substantial ROI through reduced operational costs. NetScaler is an expensive solution, appealing to organizations with larger budgets, providing excellent value for money with its advanced features and security, marking it a valuable investment for those who can manage the costs.

To learn more, read our detailed DX Spectrum vs. NetScaler Report (Updated: March 2025).

DX Spectrum vs. NetScaler

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

DX Spectrum

Ranking in Network Management Applications

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

117

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (21st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), Network Troubleshooting (6th), DX NetOps (1st)

NetScaler

Ranking in Network Management Applications

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

107

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (1st), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Network Management Applications category, the mindshare of DX Spectrum is 2.5%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetScaler is 1.5%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Management Applications

Featured Reviews

DickBaker

Network Design Engineer DTCC at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

An all-inclusive monitoring solution that adapts to emerging technologies

The product helps to correlate events. The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability. DX Spectrum needs better documentation on its complex features. I have been using the product since 2005. I rate DX Spectrum's stability an eight point five…

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DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU

Cloud Consultant at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We were able to standardize the internal processes across all internal departments, resulting in almost an elimination of non-standard process flows through our organization."

"The performance manager is very good."

"The fault management is perfect."

"The stability of the product is key. It never breaks, really. The stability and reliability of the Spectrum product have been top-notch."

"Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing."

"Spectrum does such a great job of discovering our network that we have a high confidence in what our inventory is."

"It is easy to navigate."

"Some of the most valuable features are it's highly scalable, the carrier is great, and if something has SNMP, it can monitor it. It's a great network fault management solution."

More DX Spectrum pros

"The most valuable feature is load balancing."

"It is simple for both IT specialists and customers."

"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."

"The solution's technical support is good."

"It is a very stable solution."

"Easy, user-friendly setup with content switching and integrated caching features."

"If you need PCI-compliance and have high security requirements, WAF is the most valuable feature. If you need to monitor your load-balancing services with complex types of monitoring, make sure everything is alright, and load balancing is important, Content Switching and Monitoring features are the keys to your needs. If you want to provide a lot of static images or data, the Caching feature works best for you."

"We have good customer support."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"From the users perspective the looks and feel of dashboards of Spectrum would be easier to use and for understanding as APM will be in 10.5 version which we saw in CA World."

"DX Spectrum should have an automatic ticketing mechanism with ServiceNow. I need to use other tools for event management."

"From a functionality perspective, the product is not doing what it should. Also, there are some concerns about the accessibility. I would appreciate additional out-of-the-box troubleshooting scripts, like templates for addressing various issues. Currently, when troubleshooting online, I need to create my scripts. It would be beneficial if the platform could provide pre-built scripts or templates to help automate certain troubleshooting tasks."

"For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts."

"For us, the implementation was quite complex but it's because of the large number of different environments we're dealing with."

"The product should provide performance management features."

"There's a little bit of complexity to the initial install because you're dealing with operating systems. You have to make sure all the prerequisites are done, anti-virus exceptions, etc. Then there's the bringing it up and then there's discovery of the network and setting that up. It takes time."

"DX Spectrum could be improved by them getting rid of the Java console. It would also be better with Turkish language support."

More DX Spectrum cons

"We would like to see some fairly large scale improvement in the configuration process for this solution."

"Deployment is complicated."

"Citrix should offer a demo or free-trial version of NetScaler. Several other vendors do, but Citrix does not. Pricing should also be more readily available."

"Too many bugs in the software and it's always difficult when you need to update."

"There is room for improvement regarding the pricing policy for Citrix offices."

"Technical support could be improved."

"The only thing customers told me that could be improved is that they would like to be able to purchase and receive the products in one box, rather than two boxes. This is something related to marketing, though."

"We had some bugs in the previous firmware. These were not big issues, but more testing on the firmware would be key to happier customers."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."

"The price of the solution is reasonable."

"The cost of some of these products are a little cost prohibitive, which is unfortunate. We have to find lower cost solutions for some of the things that we have to pull in. For the most part, CA has capabilities in pretty much everything that you would need. You just have to figure out where are you going to spend the most money for what you have to actually get done. You can do all these things but, which ones do you have to do? And that's hard to choose sometimes because you want to do them all."

"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."

"The price is very high."

"It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller."

"Spectrum is expensive."

"In general, the license cost will be about 30% of the total TCO for this tool (hardware/support team, OS costs, and OS management)."

More DX Spectrum pricing and cost advice

"After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more expensive."

"This product is more expensive than some of the competitors."

"We have a yearly licencing fee, and there are no additional costs."

"The solution's pricing is very high compared to its competitors."

"In Turkey, everything is good, but it seems expensive for us due to the currency exchange. I don't have a specific rating scale, but if I had to rate the price, I would say it's around a six out of ten."

"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."

"There isn't much of a difference between the cost of Citrix and that of other similar solutions."

"Price-wise, I feel that the solution is a little bit expensive."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Management Applications solutions are best for your needs.

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844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Educational Organization

15%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about DX Spectrum?

The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Spectrum?

We are a customer of Broadcom, we use a group license that covers various CA products, including DX Spectrum. The company purchases the licenses they need from this group license, and we do not hav...

What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?

DX Spectrum should have an automatic ticketing mechanism with ServiceNow. I need to use other tools for event management. It has a dashboarding mechanism and monitors devices and network switches t...

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 ...

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Compared 16% of the time

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Nagios XI vs DX Spectrum

Compared 9% of the time

ThousandEyes vs DX Spectrum

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

HAProxy vs NetScaler

Compared 11% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler

Compared 9% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs NetScaler

Compared 8% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NetScaler

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

DX Spectrum

Download DX Spectrum product report

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Also Known As

CA Spectrum

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall

Overview

DX Spectrum is a complete event and fault management system for network operations teams. The tool provides powerful capabilities for managing your dynamic, complex IT infrastructure, which includes physical, virtual, and cloud environments.The technology allows you to manage and optimize the infrastructure and the professional services that operate on top of it. DX Spectrum is a unified platform that helps your company enhance network service levels while lowering monitoring costs.

DX Spectrum has intelligent event correlation and root-cause analysis capabilities. It can pinpoint the precise components that are causing issues with availability and network settings. Reports and dashboards can be customized with role-based views. Change management solutions can also be used by teams to govern, track, and remediate changes across network devices.

DX Spectrum can identify multi-technology and multi-vendor stacks, as well as new software-defined networks (SDNs). It supports Multicast, MPLS, VPN, and VRF, among other routing protocols and technologies.

DX Spectrum Features

DX Spectrum has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Service management: DX Spectrum assists personnel in discovering, modeling, visualizing, monitoring, and managing the links between infrastructure and the business services it supports.

Fault detection: DX Spectrum offers unique solutions that automate device discovery and root cause analysis, allowing for faster issue detection and resolution.

Change management capabilities: DX Spectrum gives administrators the visibility and control they need to prevent erroneous modifications from causing network performance problems and outages.

Comprehensive visibility: With DX Spectrum, managers can receive comprehensive insight across physical, virtualized, and cloud environments, as well as a variety of technologies, platforms, and suppliers.

Customization: DX Spectrum provides administrators, users, and customers with pre-packaged, easily configurable dashboards and reports that may be adjusted to their individual needs. For maximum performance and visibility, it is intimately connected with other solutions within the DX Service Assurance and DX Service Management systems.

DX Spectrum Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing DX Spectrum. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduce symptomatic alarms and hasten resolution with DX Spectrum’s root-cause analysis and robust event correlation. Automatically map the relationships between your network infrastructure to find the source of service issues for faster resolution. Whether it's a network configuration or availability issue, our network fault management system pinpoints the exact component responsible for the issue.
DX Spectrum supports network access from wireless wearables, mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. Provide network operators with the tools they need to manage their wireless networks, decrease outages, and make them as stable as their wired networks. For wired and wireless networks, DX Spectrum offers a unified view.

Fault and event management can be integrated across the Agile Ops, Network Operations, and Analytics portfolios. Fault, inventory, and topology knowledge are combined with performance, application, and log monitoring and a unified view across a full-stack NetOps solution. Additional connections include business service and service desk management.

Reviews from Real Users

DX Spectrum stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust root cause analysis and its event correlation tool. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Umair A., Enterprise Solutions & Services Head at Duroob Technologies, writes of the product, “It covers networks very well. It has all the capabilities that you're looking for when it comes to monitoring. Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing. If you have a CA Service Desk, then it can be integrated so that if you have open tickets they can be closed automatically.”

Itarchit, an IT Architect at a comms service provider, notes, “The most valuable feature is the event correlation mechanism. I also like the product's multi-customer approach.” He adds, “We haven't seen a better product. Overall, I am happy with this solution. Based on the current market, I would rate DX Spectrum a nine out of ten.”

Broadcom

One platform for a consistent application delivery and security experience because nobody has time to learn multiple systems to manage ADC deployments. NetScaler is built with a single code base using a software-based architecture, so no matter which ADC form factor you choose — hardware, virtual machine, bare metal, or container — the behavior will be the same.

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi

ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk

DX Spectrum vs. NetScaler