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Kemp LoadMaster vs NGINX Plus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Kemp LoadMaster
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
8th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Kemp LoadMaster is 7.6%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 7.9%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

PeterForster - PeerSpot reviewer
A highly stable and scalable load-balancing software that offers great technical support
My company is really happy with Kemp LoadMaster as a product. My company is also happy with the support we receive from Kemp LoadMaster. I want Kemp LoadMaster to provide users with better reporting capabilities in relation to TCP packets. In general, the connections that are present in the system require improvement. Feature-wise, Kemp LoadMaster has everything that our company's customers require. Kemp LoadMaster also has features that have supported our company's past projects.
Ritesh-Bakhru - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are most impressed with the ease of use and great support."
"When you configure the listening services, you can implement a lot of security features like the Edge Security Pack that intercepts the requests and processes those before they are sent to the real servers."
"The most valuable features for us are the Load Balancing and Web Application Firewall, as we have a lot of web applications."
"It is an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface, and you can set up a new VIP in a couple of minutes."
"Failover is seamless and our services are rock solid."
"The feature that allows us to easily disconnect a server when we need and bring back online is the most valuable. It's a click of a button. This allows us to keep all systems up. We can then run updates, perform reboots whatever we need to one of the servers without taking production down."
"The security features are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The pricing of the solution is valuable."
"I receive very good support."
"​The flexibility of its modules allow it to be scalable.​"
"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."
"With NGINX, I appreciate its ability to route traffic geographically."
"I find the solution’s community support and documentation most valuable. Compared to HAProxy, have found a lot of documentation and community support on Quora. If you would be asking me as a developer whether to choose this product, I would recommend this since it has good community support, documentation, and signature updates. The configuration of HAProxy is also very tedious. However, NGINX’s configuration is very simple."
"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 most valuable feature of the solution is that it is simple to configure."
"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."
 

Cons

"Certificate installations could be simplified and modernized, and allowed to be monitored for expirations/issues."
"It would be very helpful to get all the http/https session logs by default in the log monitor without activating debugging mode like an apache web sever natively does"
"I want to have the ability to pull a particular server. The DevOps portion was challenging for me, like if I needed to redirect from one IP to another URL. I needed to look that up, and the knowledge base is not well organized. When I look for information about Kemp on the Internet, I don't find many articles or something like that."
"We have experienced at least one problem with stability, although it was fixed with an upgrade."
"It would be much easier to have the management interface directly integrate with the Kemp Support library, allowing you to choose the desired template from the online catalog to then directly download to the LoadMaster."
"It has all types of logs and they are very detailed, but it's a little bit hard to search for a single event."
"Overall, the Kemp LoadMaster has been an all-rounder great product and stable. The free trial and virtual edition make it a breeze for any potential customer to give it a spin before actually deciding to put it on the infrastructure or even talk to the CFO."
"Perhaps Kemp could offer some training videos."
"The biggest room for improvement would be to allow NGINX Core machines to cluster for memory zones in some way with a plug and play module. ​"
"It would be good if NGINX provided a graphical user interface."
"The scalability could be improved."
"The center management system could be improved."
"The drawback is that you must obtain a license for everything."
"The solution's GUI is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"The user interface could be improved."
"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"KEMP gives away free trials for 30 days. This can be stretched if you want. During the test, you will have access to KEMP support.​"
"They have multiple tiers of licensing and you can upgrade it easily."
"The costs for the Kemp Load Balancer solution are okay because, for a good product, you have to spend money."
"Less expensive than Citrix."
"Nowadays, going with the virtual appliance is the easiest way and the cost is reasonable."
"Licensing is yearly and I am going to guess that it is CAN $2000.00."
"The price is lower than other options."
"The license varies according to the number of megabits."
"​NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it.​"
"It's an open source solution, so it's free."
"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
"​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. ​"
"There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free."
"I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost."
"The solution is free, but you can spend a lot of money with a complex solution."
"You pay for each feature that you want."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
63%
Computer Software Company
7%
University
3%
Government
3%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Kemp LoadMaster?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten...The initial setup of Kemp LoadMaster is very simple.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kemp LoadMaster?
LoadMaster is cheaper than some other solutions. It has a perpetual license, so it's a one-time cost.
What needs improvement with Kemp LoadMaster?
There are some challenges with updates on certain models that don't have a few features. The support team often takes a lot of time to provide resolutions for issues. Also, I could see more capabil...
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,...
What do you like most about NGINX Plus?
It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?
My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.
 

Also Known As

LoadMaster Load Balancer
NGINX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Kent County Council, KEMP, SMA Solar Technology AG, RT€ Player , Victrix (Quebec, Canada), Texas A&M, Macmillan Cancer Support, Cisco, Austin Bank
Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA
Find out what your peers are saying about Kemp LoadMaster vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.