Fortinet FortiADC vs NGINX Plus comparison

Fortinet and F5 are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. Fortinet is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.0, while F5 is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3. Fortinet holds a 9.4% mindshare in ADC, compared to F5’s 8.6% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Fortinet users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of F5 users who would recommend it.

Fortinet FortiADC

Read 22 Fortinet FortiADC reviews

4,091 Views
3,363 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

NGINX Plus

Read 29 NGINX Plus reviews

4,650 Views
3,775 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Fortinet FortiADC

NGINX Plus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiADC and NGINX Plus 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. NGINX Plus Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiADC vs. NGINX Plus

December 2024

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Helped 817,354 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

NGINX Plus

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

5th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiADC is 9.4%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 8.6%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Sameer Ghewade

Manager, Information Technology at Parag Milk Foods Ltd

A stable and scalable solution that is easy to operate and has single-handed control

Fortinet's fixed application version has very good policies. Some features have been reduced in the new version of Fortinet FortiADC. Whenever Fortinet updates its application version, it should provide the same features. For example, I was using MAC-based control for end users. Six months back, I updated the version of Fortinet OS. The MAC-based control on the new version was CLI-based, which is difficult to manage. I wanted the MAC-based control to be GUI-based. Fortinet FortiADC should include an advanced-level SD-WAN.

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Ritesh-Bakhru

Major Account Manager at Check Point Software

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution provides high-level services such as availability, redundancy, and load balancing between servers."

"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."

"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."

"Simple to use and easy to integrate."

"Because ADC is the intermediary between the servers and the end-user application, it gives thorough information about the traffic, what the problem is."

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

"From a technical perspective, it is the most scalable device from Fortinet."

"The solution enhances performance by efficiently balancing the load across multiple backend servers."

More Fortinet FortiADC pros

"With NGINX, I appreciate its ability to route traffic geographically."

"This solution has everything."

"NGINX Plus' most valuable feature is the ingress controller."

"The product is resilient."

"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."

"Nginx is simple to configure, very stable in a highly utilized environment and very modular, allowing DevOps to create it's own modules for interactive use with Nginx."

"The load balancing module, which is equivalent to LTM, is the focus of the PSE. So far, the features of both are identical. I believe NGINX has more features for securing these services, but in terms of load balancing, both are massive solutions."

"The most valuable features are the gateway and the ability to publish to sites."

More NGINX Plus pros

Cons

"Though FortiADC is useful, I'd appreciate more user-friendly features and in-depth insights into network activity, like detailed logs and AI-driven feedback for optimization."

"Technical support and documentation could both be improved."

"FortiADC is complex to configure so the interface should be improved."

"Setup could be easier. The company's homework is to redesign those menus to configure with the smallest number of steps."

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

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

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

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

More Fortinet FortiADC cons

"Improvement needed in NGINX Plus could focus on optimizing memory usage for users."

"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."

"I would like the configuration process to be more simplified."

"They should do in the open source version of what they did to Advanced HTTP, TCP, and UDP load balancing."

"The solution's GUI is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement."

"It would be great if there was even more automation to make it even easier to maintain."

"The solution must improve its performance."

More NGINX Plus cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They offer a perpetual license."

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

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

"The product has affordable pricing."

"Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better."

"The solution's pricing is an issue and should be improved."

"The solution could be more cost-effective."

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

More Fortinet FortiADC pricing and cost advice

"I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost."

"I am not so happy with their pricing policy, but this is not the worse thing in my life. I can tolerate it."

"Nginx is free. I don't have experience with the Plus version."

"The cost is reasonable."

"NGINX Plus is an open-source solution with limited additional features. When you try to get additional features in the solution, then you need to pay an extra amount to NGINX Plus."

"NGINX Plus is worth it, if you need it. If you do not need the features or support, the free and open source package is more than capable. "

"You pay for each feature that you want."

"Compared to other similar solutions on the market, I think it's over-priced."

More NGINX Plus pricing and cost advice

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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

19%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Government

Manufacturing 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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiADC?

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

See all answers

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,...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX Plus?

It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?

There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free. There's also NGINX Plus, which is a paid version with additional features.

See all answers

Comparisons

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

Compared 26% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 26% of the time

NetScaler vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 13% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 8% of the time

FortiGSLB vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 2% of the time

More Fortinet FortiADC Competitors

IIS vs NGINX Plus

Compared 19% of the time

HAProxy vs NGINX Plus

Compared 18% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs NGINX Plus

Compared 14% of the time

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

Compared 9% of the time

IBM DataPower Gateway vs NGINX Plus

Compared 3% of the time

More NGINX Plus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiADC

November 2024

Download Fortinet FortiADC product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX Plus

November 2024

Download NGINX Plus product report

Also Known As

FortiADC Application Delivery Controller, FortiADC

NGINX

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.

NGINX Plus is a versatile solution that offers load balancing, caching, proxying, and API deployment capabilities. It can be deployed on private or public clouds and is ideal for building CDN solutions. The solution can also be used to secure web applications and replace web services like Apache.

NGINX has helped organizations improve functioning, reduce downtimes, and offer a DevOps-friendly solution. Its community support and documentation are highly regarded, and its configuration is more straightforward, making it a recommended choice over HAProxy.

Sample Customers

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

Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiADC vs. NGINX Plus

December 2024

Free Report: Fortinet FortiADC vs. NGINX Plus

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