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 9.6% mindshare in ADC, compared to F5’s 8.4% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of Fortinet users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of F5 users who would recommend it.

Fortinet FortiADC

Read 23 Fortinet FortiADC reviews

3,923 Views
3,249 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

NGINX Plus

Read 30 NGINX Plus reviews

4,382 Views
3,571 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Fortinet FortiADC

NGINX Plus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

NGINX Plus and Fortinet FortiADC compete in the application delivery and load balancing category. NGINX Plus seems to have the upper hand due to its customizability and strong community support.

Features: NGINX Plus offers superior load balancing, reverse proxy capabilities, and integration options. Its modularity allows for advanced configuration. It is appreciated for its simplicity and stability. Fortinet FortiADC provides robust global server load balancing, SSL offloading, and integrates seamlessly with FortiOS, which enhances its security features.

Room for Improvement: NGINX Plus could benefit from enhanced cluster management, a more user-friendly interface, and improved pricing structure. Users indicate a need for better health checks and scalability features. Fortinet FortiADC requires a more intuitive setup process, improved support responsiveness, and expanded security features, with its complex configuration and documentation needing refinement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NGINX Plus is flexible, supporting deployment across public, hybrid, and on-premises environments, with robust community support. However, official support response times can be slow for lower-tier licenses. Fortinet FortiADC primarily supports on-premises and private cloud setups. Its deployment ease varies by environment, with users seeking more detailed documentation for smoother implementation.

Pricing and ROI: NGINX Plus has a mix of free and paid options, with a debatable affordability versus feature set. It may be costly but justified by enhanced capabilities. Fortinet FortiADC offers competitive pricing, often cheaper than alternatives, with straightforward licensing praised for being cost-effective for large deployments, offering clear ROI through its features and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiADC vs. NGINX Plus Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiADC vs. NGINX Plus

January 2025

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Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiADC

Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

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

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiADC is 9.6%, up from 7.3% 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

Saeid Khanipour Ghobani

IT Manager at Technology Evaluation Center

High-level load balancing and routing protocols but scalability is limited to 200 gigabits

The initial setup and configuration are very easy because the solution includes a simple OS. Initial configuration takes about ten minutes for simple environments. It is important to assess the environment and decide what services, servers, and web applications are needed. The solution can be configured in router mode or one-arm mode which uses source NAT as destination NAT to send traffic to the firewall. One-arm mode is more complex and requires discussions with our engineers. For example, you have a website with Node.js for your programming language, Amazon S3 for your CDN, NGINX for your web server, and you use both React and reCAPTCHA. Our team meets with your developer to learn your website and OS through a multi-step process and then we configure the solution to protect everything.

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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

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

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

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

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

"The product has flexible and interesting licensing options."

"It helps with defining server load balancing tasks and managing SSL certificates, ensuring the communication flow through the Fortinet gateway."

"The main feature that we use is GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing). GSLB makes the customer's network more reliable by scaling applications across multiple datacenters. GSLB as a disaster recovery solution can direct traffic based on site availability."

"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."

More Fortinet FortiADC pros

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

"I think installation only took a couple of minutes — no more than 10 minutes."

"The overall product rating is ten out of ten."

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

"When I worked in a security research center, we tested NGINX to support DoS and DDoS attacks, and its results were great."

"Valuable features include authentication, caching, reverse proxy routing, and load balancing."

"Its most valuable features are load balancing and application delivery. This is the most efficient application for these features because of stability and its efficiency."

"The product is lightweight and fast."

More NGINX Plus pros

Cons

"Issues with SSL and encrypted traffic."

"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."

"Technical support and documentation could both be improved."

"When the FortiADC is part of a platform with components like FortiManager and FortiGate, automation and pushing configuration are very inconvenient."

"Fortinet FortiADC should include an advanced-level SD-WAN."

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

"The initial setup could be simplified."

More Fortinet FortiADC cons

"Make modules easier to enable or disable. The beauty and ugly side of the NGINX modules is you have to know how to compile the module. For beginners or non-very technical aspirant(s) going for NGINX, they have to learn how to compile the modules."

"I would like it to have a more user-friendly graphical interface."

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

"If NGINX brings some features for health check in the open source version, it would be better. "

"One area of improvement could be that NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates."

"Only improvement needed that I would point to is scalability. With it, I mean clusterized organisation on a low level. At the moment, the best alternative is RHEL HA."

"The user interface could be improved."

"One area of improvement could be that NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates."

More NGINX Plus cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The price is competitive"

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

"The solution could be more cost-effective."

"Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better."

"They offer a perpetual license."

More Fortinet FortiADC pricing and cost advice

"The cost is reasonable."

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

"It's an open source solution, so it's free."

"You pay for each feature that you want."

"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."

"NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it."

"The solution is free, but you can spend a lot of money with a complex solution."

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

More NGINX Plus pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

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?

NGINX is not cost-effective, especially for few applications, and is considered higher-priced.

See all answers

Comparisons

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

Compared 27% 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 10% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs NGINX Plus

Compared 3% of the time

More NGINX Plus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiADC

January 2025

Download Fortinet FortiADC product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX Plus

December 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

January 2025

Free Report: Fortinet FortiADC vs. NGINX Plus

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