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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
NetScaler
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (1st), Network Management Applications (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Sooryanarayan Hegde - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy management and configuration, affordable, and has good features
We use all the features. It is very useful. Using WAF, we can control the WAF rules based on our application requirements. We can control what rules should be used and what should be disabled. The role of the tool is limited to HTTP traffic. It does exactly what it must do. It's a regional service. We know how to use it for DR scenarios. WAF has been the most valuable in protecting applications. We use at least three instances in the back end to give the best performance for our applications. The management and configuration of the solution is quite easy. All certificate renewals are automatically taken care of by Key Vault.
DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool for centralized management including inventory and sales tracking
Citrix ADM has the ability to implement policies to tighten security. For instance, you can restrict access to your network from outsiders or lack necessary security measures such as antivirus programs. Additionally, there's the Delivery Controller, which allows for comprehensive monitoring and management tasks such as remote restarts, maintenance, and registration. Another essential component is the Director, which provides detailed insights into sessions, including identifying session failures, connection issues, user lockouts, etc. It presents a list of problems to address, enabling you to click on them and resolve them efficiently.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"The solution was very easy to configure. It wasn't hard at all to adjust it to our needs."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway gives us a lot of benefits, including domain mapping."
"We use the product in front-end and back-end applications to do the load balancing smartly."
"The solution's integration is very good."
"I find Application Gateway’s WAF module valuable because it helps prevent layer 7 attacks."
"It does an excellent job of load balancing."
"The pricing is quite good."
"This is a SaaS product, so it is always up to date."
"The stability is good. If there is a problem, the load will be shifted to other sites automatically, which has been a good experience for us."
"The solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature."
"The analytics are a great feature."
"NetScaler Gateway: Why? Availability/Security: We delivered more than 200 applications thru Xenapp. This feature give us the possibility to deliver the applications anywhere. Currently, 30% of access is made through our NetScaler Gateway (Internet connections)."
"Very stable."
"The solution can scale."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is its load balancing."
"Available on any device and can be accessed on a wide area network."
 

Cons

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"Support response time could be improved."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"It takes a lot of time for a certificate to update in the system. That is a huge drawback, affecting the load-balancing side. And when there are changes to the load balancing, it affects the end-user."
"The solution has many limitations. You cannot upgrade the VPN to the application gateway. So I started with version one, which has limited capabilities, and they provided version two. And unfortunately, I cannot upgrade from v one to v two like other services. So I have to decommission the version one and create a new one with version two. Also the version one was complex with the certificates uploading the SQL certificates."
"It does not have the flexibility for using public IPs in version 2."
"The solution could improve by increasing the performance when doing updates. For example, if I change the certificate it can take 30 minutes. Other vendors do not have this type of problem."
"The solution doesn’t support wildcard-based and regular expression-based rules."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"The pricing of the solution could be improved. Right now, it's a bit expensive."
"We have encountered some issues with automatic redirection and cancellation, leading to 502 and 504 gateway errors. So, I experienced some trouble with containers."
"I would like to see more integration for single sign-on."
"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 have issues with the certificates. All authorization processes need certificates, however, every three months we needed to change certificates. This process iss complicated for us because Citrix does not have a not user-friendly interface and does not off user-friendly services. This needs a lot of improvement."
"Too many bugs in the software and it's always difficult when you need to update."
"Their upgrades are not very backward compatible, and sometimes they mess up."
"There are some features which are missing.​"
"When a new version comes out, sometimes, my existing configuration gets wiped out. They should work on this so that my existing configuration doesn't get impacted with an upgrade to a newer version. There could also reduce frequent firmware upgrade activities and have a stable version so that once we upgrade it, we don't have to upgrade it for two to three years."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the user interface because sometimes it can be complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The pricing is based on how much you use the solution."
"The cost is not an issue."
"I rate the pricing seven out of ten because some third-party solutions are even costlier than this."
"I would rate the pricing a three out of ten, with ten being cheap and one being expensive."
"The solution is reasonably priced compared to other solutions."
"I rate the price of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway an eight out of ten."
"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."
"The solution is cheaper than Imperva. I rate it four to five out of ten."
"After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more expensive."
"This product is more expensive than some of the competitors."
"It all depends on the features that will be used and the number of accesses."
"The client pays for the Citrix NetScaler license annually."
"It is an enterprise solution. Thus, its costs are reasonable."
"Our licensing fees including technical support are approximately $3,500 USD."
"The pricing could be lower."
"For partners, NetScaler is not as expensive price-wise versus F5."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...
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 ente...
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...
What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?
Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexi...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs. NetScaler and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.