F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Download the complete report

Helped 831,158 peers since 2012

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

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

120

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Azure Application...

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

4th

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is 15.3%, down from 15.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is 8.5%, down from 11.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Mahmoud-Yassin

Head of IT Infrastructure and Security Operations at United Arab Bank

You can fully automate disaster recovery

LTM's cloud capabilities could be improved. Cloud providers all offer load balancing, but you can't get the same level of security. F5's cloud service is still not on par with its on-prem service. F5 acquired multiple companies a few years ago, but they still haven't integrated those solutions. For example, F5 acquired Shape Security, which had an excellent solution for detecting bots and automated login attacks, but F5 offers the solution in an inflexible way. It is only available as a cloud-based solution. It isn't zone-based. Some companies are restricted from sending financial data outside the country because of GDPR in Europe or other national regulations. Here in the UAE, we can't send host data out.

Read full review

Sooryanarayan Hegde

Technical Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Easy management and configuration, affordable, and has good features

We use all the features. It is very useful. Using WAF, we can control the WAF rules based on our application requirements. We can control what rules should be used and what should be disabled. The role of the tool is limited to HTTP traffic. It does exactly what it must do. It's a regional service. We know how to use it for DR scenarios. WAF has been the most valuable in protecting applications. We use at least three instances in the back end to give the best performance for our applications. The management and configuration of the solution is quite easy. All certificate renewals are automatically taken care of by Key Vault.

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

"The solution is easy to install. It's a straightforward process."

"It is a very good, flexible solution. It helps us to catch up on flaws in our partner solutions on top of its load balancing feature."

"It integrates with AWS WAF, which makes it easy to deploy without changes to your infrastructure."

"Initial setup is easy and pretty standard."

"We have multiple solutions we can deploy through the F5."

"It has so many features. First of all, it has a full proxy architecture, it has multiple modules. The best feature is the WAF, the web application firewall module. It also has cashing type capabilities. It has all kinds of load-balancing algorithms based on your IT requirements."

"If I were to choose one key feature in particular, perhaps it would be the iRule feature. It’s a really versatile tool."

"We have found the consistency of the application always being the way it is supposed to be as its most valuable feature."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pros

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is its ease of use."

"The pricing is quite good."

"Some of the key features of this solution are the low-level maintenance required, floating proxy service, and load balancing."

"This is a SaaS product, so it is always up to date."

"I like the tool's stability and performance."

"The solution integrates different applications and APIs securely, enhancing overall security and network optimization."

"I rate Microsoft Azure Application Gateway's scalability a ten out of ten. My company has more than 1000 users who use it daily."

"The health probe is pretty good for your backend health. It tells you whether it's communicating and talking to the endpoint correctly. It is quite useful."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pros

Cons

"An area for improvement in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is that it's a high-priced product."

"The user experience for dashboards and reports can be improved. They should make dashboards and the reporting system easier for users. They need to add more reports to the dashboard. Currently, for complicated reports, I have to do the customization. It should have more integration with network firewalls to be able to gather all the information required for traffic management."

"The logging features are too limited and do not give us a solid understanding of what's happening."

"Security and Reporting."

"Technical support is somewhat slow and could be improved."

"The analytics should provide insight into latency across various traffic routes and virtual servers."

"Bugs are the part of program and they are fixed with every release, as with any vendor."

"For integration with other AWS environments, we do some tie-ins with some autoscaling groups. This has been challenging for us. We have had issues, where when autoscaling groups scale up, there are some instances which are not showing up in the proper size. Then, those IPs would get registered with F5, but never get released. Therefore, we are ending up with a whole bunch of ghosted IPs."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) cons

"The support provided for the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement, especially when it comes to the response time from the support team."

"It does not have the flexibility for using public IPs in version 2."

"The pricing of the solution is a bit high. The solution should offer different pricing systems."

"Microsoft needs to work on their documentation."

"I believe that there is room for improvement in terms of additional functionality. It is an advantage to have features readily available for configuration without needing customer-defined rules."

"The solution is easy to use overall, but the dashboard could be updated with a better layout and graphical design so that we can see the data a bit easier. Microsoft could also add more documentation. The documentation Microsoft provides doesn't tell us about resource requirements. We found that the instances we had weren't sufficient to support the firewall, so we had to increase them."

"The support can be improved when you are configuring the system rules. The Disaster Recovery feature can be added in the next release. The price of the solution can be reduced a bit."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is harder to manage than Imperva. It is not intuitive and stable compared to other products."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of F5 BIG-IP LTM could improve."

"Take a look at the modules that you are going to use. Look into the best bundles for them."

"It is a bit expensive product. Kemp Loadmaster is much cheaper than F5. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It can be for one year or three years."

"Security should be involved in any base license. When you bring on F5, you only have default license. Then, the ASM product license has to be purchased. It would be great if F5 could include the ASM in the base license."

"Our company pays for the licensing cost on a yearly basis. Also, there are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"I found F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) an expensive product. The costs would depend on the appliance and infrastructure size. However, my company didn't have to pay extra to use additional features."

"If your IT budget is good, go for it."

"F5 is expensive."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pricing and cost advice

"The tool's pricing model is pay-as-you-go."

"There is a need to pay a fixed price per month to use the product. There are no additional payments to be made to Microsoft apart from the charges paid towards the monthly licensing costs attached to the solution."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has less price than other application gateway solutions."

"The solution is fairly priced."

"It is not expensive."

"The solution is cheaper than Imperva. I rate it four to five out of ten."

"The product is not expensive."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is a pretty affordable product. My company needs to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs of the solution. The additional costs apart from the licensing costs of the solution vary."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP?

There are no specific areas for improvement as it is already well-resolved and doesn't require further enhancements.

What is your primary use case for F5 BIG-IP?

The primary use case includes load balancing to serve application servers and basic web application firewall solutions. Our customers use it for that purpose.

What do you like most about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?

The solution is robust and reliable.

What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?

We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides excellent support. Azure Front Door can quickly detect abnormalities before the...

How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft Azure Application Gateway web application firewall software was the better fit ...

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the performance side of things, which is why we use it.

Fortinet FortiADC vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Comparisons

Compared 18% of the time

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

Compared 11% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 7% of the time

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

Compared 7% of the time

NGINX Plus vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 6% of the time

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 14% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 10% of the time

HAProxy vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 9% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Competitors

Product Reports

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Download F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) product report

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Download Microsoft Azure Application Gateway product report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway report

Also Known As

F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP

Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway

Learn More

Microsoft

Overview

F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.

BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Sample Customers

Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.

Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway