Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler comparison

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Fortinet FortiADC

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiADC and NetScaler based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiADC vs. NetScaler Report (Updated: September 2024).

Fortinet FortiADC vs. NetScaler

September 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

8th

Average Rating

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

NetScaler

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiADC is 9.0%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetScaler is 16.1%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Andrew Reynolds

Senior Technical Consultant at CBR Cyber Pty Ltd

Jun 20, 2024

Has OWASP Top Ten feature for automated protection and can do offline patches without causing customer outages

I like the load-balancing components because they are very straightforward. The interface is easy to get around and follows a very logical pattern and the API's are very easy to follow. The basic OWASP protections it offers in the web application firewall are also useful. The tool does what it says on the box. Setting up priority groups and using health monitors is easy. We can do patches offline to application servers without causing outages that would affect the customer. The web application firewall features, especially those related to the OWASP Top Ten, provide easily integrated and automated protections. This helps with legislative compliance for our Apps and for compliance with the PCI security standards. This allows more flexibility in patching the back end applications and it offers visibility into the requests being made to the applications - you can't protect what you can't see.

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Djurre Woudstra

Senior Network Engineer at a legal firm with 201-500 employees

Feb 2, 2023

A stable solution to facilitate Citric remote access, with a very complicated configuration process

We solely use this solution for Citrix remote access This has allowed us to secure Citrix remote access from the internet, as it is currently the only solution available that enables this. We appreciate that this solution facilitates our access to Citrix internet. We would like to see some…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's a good product because it supports all the features that ADC solutions in the market can support, like F5 solutions, for example, such as the LTM of F5."

"I am impressed with the product's load-balancing feature."

"The most valuable feature is its simplicity."

"Although FortiADC has multiple features that I like, the global DNS is the most helpful. It is primarily useful for customers with huge environments and at least two data centers. FortiADC can act as your DNS server. It can check which data center has the lowest latency, and route traffic to that one. It's an intelligent DNS."

"Key features include SSL Offloading, VM availability, and L7 load balancing."

"The product has flexible and interesting licensing options."

"The GSLB, the DR side, is the best part. Because we had our main side in one city, we created another, and we had a complete MPLS over the internet. We used the GSLB and data loss for our business applications."

"Ease of use in deploying and having it up and running requires minimal knowledge."

More Fortinet FortiADC pros

"For desktop application management, I recommend the NetScaler edition. This product is like a Swiss army knife. Citrix NetScaler ADC supports the education front-end."

"Its customer support service is good."

"From a security standpoint, It is a comprehensive solution in a single box."

"The solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature."

"The MAS integration for HDX Insight has provided teams with significant visibility into network performance of the user's connection."

"Most of the functions are user-friendly and great."

"It is a stable solution. It crashed only once, four years ago...There is a return on investment using the solution."

"Load balancing, cache redirection, content switching, all connected with traffic management."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"Fortinet has some drawbacks, and it can be a bit challenging to scale."

"There is a mismatch between the number of features they are offering and the device capacity on how much it can handle."

"It would be good if they built in a fully functional web application firewall."

"The product's stability for VMs could be better."

"The solution needs to integrate sFlow. sFlow provides better visualization of the bandwidth and types of traffic passing through the device. When used in the traffic path, this information can be really useful."

"The product’s price could be reduced. Also, some of its features need to be more advanced."

"The solution should improve finding false positives and false negatives. There are a lot of false positives."

"The solution's WAF needs an upgrade because it is not as good as FortiWeb, VMware, F5, or Imperva."

More Fortinet FortiADC cons

"ADC from Citrix has added functionalities from other products and the usability is very difficult for someone who is used to a simpler user interface, it's a little bit of a mess to use."

"We face challenges with the solution's firmware upgrades frequently."

"Does not include security. A web application firewall would be a nice addition."

"I will try to migrate all the tools to the cloud because there is more lab and more VPN scalability available in the cloud. It is not available on-premises."

"The vendor provides frequent patches, however, the security of the website has room for improvement."

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

"If one device or switch fails, the failover to another device is not seamless which is painful."

"Some of our customers have questioned the security of this solution lately, wondering whether it is safe or not, so enhancements in this respect would be good."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than F5 or Imperva and is the most reasonably priced option available."

"The product has average pricing. I rate its pricing a five out of ten."

"Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better."

"I rate Fortinet FortiADC's pricing one out of ten. It is fixed."

"Our basic license excludes features such as antivirus and IDS. Due to license limitations, some functionalities are not configured."

"I believe the price is good. It's fair. There are no extra costs."

"The price is competitive"

"The solution could be more cost-effective."

More Fortinet FortiADC pricing and cost advice

"The client pays for the Citrix NetScaler license annually."

"Costly product and complicated licensing."

"Its price is comparable to others and affordable."

"It's an expensive product but it works well."

"It all depends on the features that will be used and the number of accesses."

"You get the value for your money. There aren't any hidden fees."

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

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

More NetScaler 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.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.

Do you recommend Fortinet FortiADC?

I recommend Fortinet FortiADC. My experience with Fortinet has been very positive. Our company has been using it for around five years. We mainly use FortiADC for the load balancing of application ...

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiADC?

The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily.

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 ...

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

Comparisons

Compared 26% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 23% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 8% of the time

A10 Networks Thunder ADC vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 6% of the time

Loadbalancer.org vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 4% of the time

More Fortinet FortiADC Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 20% of the time

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

Compared 17% of the time

HAProxy vs NetScaler

Compared 11% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NetScaler

Compared 7% of the time

Loadbalancer.org vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

More NetScaler Competitors

Product Reports

Download Fortinet FortiADC product report

Fortinet FortiADC

September 2024

Download NetScaler product report

August 2024

Also Known As

FortiADC Application Delivery Controller, FortiADC

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX

Learn More

Fortinet

Overview

Fortinet FortiADC is a robust application delivery controller (ADC) that delivers application optimization, application security, and application availability. FortiADC is a valued offering from Fortinet, which is widely recognized as a trusted supplier of dynamic security solutions worldwide. FortiADC offers dynamic security functions (AV, DDoS, and WAF) in addition to advanced application connectors for a simplified deployment and complete transparency to an organization's networks and applications. FortiADC offers three primary deployment options: physical machine, virtual machine, (VM) and cloud solution options.

Fortinet FortiADC Benefits

FortiADC security protocol: FortiADC integrates with FortiSandbox to improve the overall antivirus security protections where every file is scanned for known and unknown malicious risks. If a file is identified as malicious or problematic, it will be blocked in the future.
SSL protocol: FortiADC securely uses the most up-to-date cryptography to provide exceptional encryption and decryption using a hardware-based SSL ASIC. FortiADC offers complete transparency to inspect all traffic for threats, improves server response time, and reduces backend server load, SSL inspection and SSL offloading. FortiADC integrates seamlessly with Gemalto’s SafeNet Hardware Security Module (HSM).
FortiADC connectors: FortiADC Fabric Connectors offer open API-based integration and coordination with numerous software-defined networks (SDNs), third-party partners, and cloud management providers. Fortinet Fabric Connectors provide deep open and turnkey integration with recognized third-party vendors such as AWS, K8s, OCI, and SAP, in multi-vendor solutions, improving scalability, simplified management, and automation.
Business stability: FortiADC load balancing for on-premise global server load balancing (GSBL) and in the cloud (FortiGSBL Cloud) will ensure users can maintain a reliable and available network by improving the ability of scaling applications throughout numerous data centers to reduce application response times and enhance disaster recovery. Users are able to define protocols based on network latency concerns, overall data performance, and site availability.

Fortinet FortiADC Features

Application availability
- 4-7 application load balancing: DNS, HTTPS, RTMP, RADIUS, MySQL and more
- External fabric connectors: Splunk Integration, AWS/OCI Connector, Kubernetes Service.
- Security fabric connectors: FortiSIEM, Fortigate BanIP Integration, FortiAnalyzer, and more.
- Deployment modes: High availability (AA/AP Failover), Router mode, transparent mode (switch), one-arm mode (proxy with X-forwarded for support.
Web application firewall (WAF)
- Security services: Captcha support, cookie support, HTTP header security, XML/SOAP/JSON validation, CSRF protection, API gateway, and more.
- Application security: Web attack signature, bot detection, web vulnerability scanner, OWASP Top-10 Wizard, API protection and more.

Application enhancement
- HTTP and TCP improvement: TCP buffering, HTTP compressions/decompression, HTTP caching (dynamic and static objects), Bandwidth monitoring using quality of service (QoS), TCP buffering, and more.
- Authentication offloading: Two-factor authentication (Fortitoken/Fortitoken Cloud and Google Authentication), NTLM, AUTH2.0, SAML 2.0 (SP and Idp) RADIUS, LDAP, Kerbos, and local.
- Networking: Integration with Ansible, Cisco ACI, OpenStack and Nutanix, NVGRE and VXLAN support, VLAN and port trunking support, IPv6 Support (SLB, firewall, routing and interfaces), Dynamic NAT, Hide NAT, Static NAT for added scalability and flexibility.
- Management: Syslog support, SNMP using private MIBs with threshold-based traps. REST APIs, VDOMS, data analytics, real-time monitoring graphs, role-based monitoring, intuitive reporting, FortiView integration, and more.

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

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

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