Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall vs NetScaler comparison

Ivanti and NetScaler are both solutions in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category. Ivanti is ranked #16, while NetScaler is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.7. Additionally, 100% of Ivanti users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of NetScaler users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

NetScaler and Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall are solutions for web application security. Ivanti seems to have the upper hand due to its innovative security features.

Features: NetScaler offers content switching, load balancing, and DDoS protection to enhance performance. Ivanti provides comprehensive threat protection, automatic updates, and robust configurations, focusing on advanced security.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Ivanti offers streamlined deployment and excellent customer support for smooth integration. NetScaler, while powerful, requires careful setup, which can be complex.

Pricing and ROI: NetScaler has higher initial setup costs but delivers solid ROI in expansive environments. Ivanti offers cost-effective pricing with a focus on ROI through security, appealing to businesses prioritizing security without high budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

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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

Cloudflare Web Application ...

Q&A Highlights

it_user712188

Works at a tech company

Jun 30, 2018

Pulse vADC/vTM vs. Netscaler

Zeus was a great company - Its a shame Riverbed screwed up the acquisition and destroyed it. The product has been in a state of limbo for several years, I wouldn't trust Pulse to make anything out of it. Go with F5 or Citrix if you have the money. If money is an issue then go with Kemp or Loadbalancer.org which are #1 and #2 at the value end of the market. Radware is pretty cool as well - but not cheap. https://www.loadbalancer.org/blog/so-just-how-should-you-compare-load-balancers/

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Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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Mike Duffy

Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Good feature set and is simple to deploy

In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered. We've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else. We sort of stopped deploying them because of that. There are additional costs to the standard licensing. There are bandwidth prices. The feature set is quite good. We've been told to stop using them because of the price. If they can do something to address that I believe it would be better. On the latest version they've got a community edition, which is quite a good bandwidth, but in essence, it's to address the entry-level price. When you get to 10 gig bandwidth, it's way too expensive.

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Amit Ronen

IT Security Specialist at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Allows students and lecturers access to necessary software for their courses cost-effectively

I am a consultant and do not recommend specific products. I work with customers, and they decide what they want to buy. I'm a CISO as a service, dealing with security. I'm from an integrator company, and they usually sell a few products. One customer uses NetScaler for a VDI system with Citrix…

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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 pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"It is configurable via API."

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."

"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."

"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."

"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."

"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is simple to deploy. The deployment took us ten minutes."

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is simple to deploy."

"It is a complete solution for those looking for an all-in-one."

"The stability is good, and if there is a problem, the load will be shifted to other sites automatically, which has been a good experience for us."

"Load Balancing and SSL offloading are key features."

"Allows the user to easily scale out application delivery. Provides secure remote access. Ease of management and business continuity support. Powerful, reliable, and feature rich solution all in one appliance."

"If you have a use case for an application controller for load balancing, web application firewall, or virtual infrastructure, you can straight away go for this solution."

"The load balancing feature and the fact that you can do context switching in the WAF are the most valuable. We majorly use it for load balancing, but we also use it for context switching in the WAF. It is also robust and very easy to work with and manage."

"For NetScaler, our major use cases are database load balancing, PowerVPN VPN access gateway, WAF (Web Application Firewall), and content switching."

"Its innovative TriScale architecture and SSL offloading capability are on par with some of the best products available."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

"Support can be challenging at times."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered. We've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the price could be lowered; we've tried to deploy more of them but our purchasing department has said that they're way too expensive and they would prefer to use something else."

"Citrix ADC can be really complex. It isn't very simple like some other appliances that I've worked with. You need a lot of skill and experience to manage it. I'm not talking about a year or two. You need at least four years to understand it very well. It is not that easy to learn. They should make it a lot simpler for users to understand the management of it. They can also provide some additional training. The material they have on the site is not sufficient enough for you to understand how to manage it. Their training is expensive, and not everyone has the funds and experience for it. Citrix isn't very popular around these parts of the world. So, it can use some more marketing, sales, enlightenment, and advertisement. These could bring more market for them. Basically, there are just a few companies that really go for Citrix. Most of the companies go for VMware because they marketed themselves more than Citrix. There isn't much difference between Citrix and VMware. VMware is a little more robust than Citrix. Citrix has focused more on desktops rather than server virtualization, and that's the advantage VMware has over Citrix. Citrix also needs to educate and inform users about the infrastructure that is supported with a version. Currently, if the customers don't look at the datasheet, they might miss this important information."

"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."

"The solution should be able to scale more effectively than it does."

"The security is okay, but the monitoring and reporting need improvement."

"The support on the ADCs isn't that great and there's a lot of work required with upgrading plant environments because of security vulnerabilities that come to light."

"An area for improvement would be the difficulty in finding information about standard licensing costs over the internet. They should provide some reference prices on the net to be quickly referred to."

"Citrix ADM needs to improve on its additional features and reduce the communication ports."

"It is not perfect because at times I was faced with an issue where the application was getting a lot more traffic than is desirable, and I can see Citrix having issues with this."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"It is not too pricey."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten since it is expensive."

"Citrix Web App and API Protection are in the middle when we talk about pricing and licensing"

"For the specific use case that my customers primarily engage with, I would give the pricing a rating of seven out of ten."

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

"You can do CapEx and then a yearly monthly fee, or you can do a subscription model, whether that's one month, month-to-month, or three-year subscription model."

"I give the price of the solution a seven out of ten."

"We have been evaluating F5, Citrix, and other ADC products. Citrix is the most expense of all of them."

"The tool is cheap."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

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Answers from the Community

it_user712188

Works at a tech company

Jun 30, 2018

Pulse vADC/vTM vs. Netscaler

2 out of 5 answers

Maksim Sataev

network specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 19, 2018

As far as I know, Netscaler has special hardware solution SDX where you can run virtual appliance (VPX) so much as you need and license determines the total system performance. It's not a problem for scaling virtual appliance by each application. You can ask Citrix managers for details. I hope it will be helpful.

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GregBristow

unemployed

Jun 19, 2018

My thought would be Barracuda Cloud WAF. This will work in 15 min. With lb and default templates. Go to demo.Barracuda.com Select WAF for hardware or select cloud. Additional info ask if needed

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

No data available

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	44
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	57

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

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What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

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What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

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What advice do you have for others considering Citrix NetScaler?

Each product has its advantages, and combining certain features of F5 and NetScaler could be beneficial. I'd rate the...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix ADM?

Regarding pricing, educational institutes often receive better prices. In the context of virtualization, prices are i...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix Web App and API Protection?

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

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Comparisons

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Compared 16% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 13% of the time

HAProxy vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 13% of the time

Pulse Secure Virtual Traffic Manager vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

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Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler

Compared 8% of the time

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

Compared 7% of the time

HAProxy vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

NGINX Plus vs NetScaler

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

April 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall report

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NetScaler

April 2026

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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

Pulse vWAF, Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall, NetScaler VPX - Customer Licensed

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall delivers scalable application security for off-the-shelf and custom applications, including third-party frameworks. Apply business rules to online traffic, inspect and block attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), and filter outgoing traffic and data to mask credit card data. Ivanti Virtual Web Application Firewall helps achieve compliance with PCI-DSS requirements.

Ivanti

NetScaler is an advanced application delivery controller providing load balancing, SSL offloading, and enhanced network performance. Users benefit from its robust security features, seamless Citrix integrations, and cost-effective infrastructure.

Designed to optimize and secure application delivery, NetScaler offers high availability and supports data centers with its load balancing and reverse proxy capabilities. It ensures effective traffic management and provides valuable insights into network health while integrating easily with Citrix products. Users appreciate its centralized management via ADM and flexible deployment options tailored to their infrastructure needs. However, there is room for improvement in its management tools, interface, and documentation, alongside a need for security enhancements and better licensing flexibility.

What are the most important features of NetScaler?

Flexible Deployment: Allows adaptation to different environments and needs.
Load Balancing: Efficiently distributes traffic to enhance performance.
SSL Offloading: Offloads encryption to optimize server performance.
Content Switching: Enables tailored content delivery based on user needs.
Robust Security: Includes firewalling and AAA authentication.
Global Server Load Balancing: Distributes load across multiple locations for high availability.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Cost-effectiveness: Delivers an efficient infrastructure without high costs.
Reliable Performance: Ensures consistent delivery and resilience.
High Availability: Maintains network uptime and service quality.
Technical Support: Offers responsive assistance for operational issues.

NetScaler is implemented across sectors like healthcare, finance, and education to guarantee secure remote access, enhance application network management, and support virtual desktops. Its application gateways and VPN access capabilities make it ideal for industries needing secure and efficient connectivity solutions.

NetScaler

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Gilt Groupe

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

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

March 2026

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