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NGINX App Protect vs NetScaler comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
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 (5th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th)
NGINX App Protect
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (16th), Container Security (22nd), API Security (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
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.
Tomaz Sobczak - PeerSpot reviewer
Signature-based detection, DOS protection, and bot protection
NGINX App Protect is easier to automate and configure, or manage from an API. This is good for securing applications. However, it's not suitable for more complex tasks. NGINX App Protect positively impacted performance changes. There's a cache or it works like a proxy, so it can speed up applications. It can also offload some functions from servers, which NGINX can handle faster.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"Load balancing, cache redirection, content switching, all connected with traffic management."
"Available on any device and can be accessed on a wide area network."
"I like the monitoring ability as it enables me to identify when an internal (load-balanced) resource is having issues before it becomes a problem in production."
"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."
"It allows students to access required software for their studies."
"The work balancing applications are the most valuable feature."
"From a security standpoint, It is a comprehensive solution in a single box."
"Most of the functions are user-friendly and great."
"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working."
"There's a cache, or it works like a proxy, so it can speed up applications."
"I would say that the most valuable feature is the ability to operate in a DevOps environment and to be configured through API and pipeline by the developers themselves."
"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."
"I tested specific features and evaluated the solution against the Web Application Firewall. I conducted research to test different detection percentages. I did not use it directly for protection but for evaluation purposes."
"NGINX App Protect's best features are auto-learning, which creates a profile of applications that are deployed, bot protection, and force protection, which lets you configure your brute force policy and alert for and prevent brute force attacks."
"The most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found."
"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its open source."
 

Cons

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"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."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"The product could be improved by making it easier to use and easier to implement."
"Mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexity."
"The solution is a bit more expensive than some of the available solutions in this region. One solution in particular that I noticed was cheaper was Kemp."
"The GUI should be improved."
"The tool needs to add a feature where we can access the network policy access manager."
"The configuration is complex, and only one or two people know how to assist when problems arise."
"The main areas for improvement would be around documentation and support. If a feature can be used in two or three ways, show that feature being used in all of those ways. Documentation seems to only cover the primary use case and leaves you to either run through trial and error or consult the user community. In terms of support, I have never actually had them solve any of my issues. I have always solved them myself and then provided the resolution to support."
"Citrix ADC can improve if it provides a more user-friendly interface and clear working protocols. Citrix is not working with classic RFC, it is working with Citrix RFC, which is not common in the world. If engineers of Citrix can provide us with more information on working with the classic IP networks it would be a benefit."
"The configuration needs to be more flexible because it is difficult to do things that are outside of the ordinary."
"The solution needs to be improved in the e-commerce portal."
"The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model is also not good."
"They could provide a better user interface."
"NGINX App Protect would be improved with integration with Shape and F5 WAF, which would make it easy for users to manage all their web application security with a single solution."
"Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time."
"It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput."
"The dashboard could provide a more comprehensive view of the status of the connections."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"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."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"In Turkey, everything is good, but it seems expensive for us due to the currency exchange. I don't have a specific rating scale, but if I had to rate the price, I would say it's around a six out of ten."
"The license for Citrix NetScaler is on an annual basis and it is reasonably priced."
"The client pays for the Citrix NetScaler license annually."
"We have been evaluating F5, Citrix, and other ADC products. Citrix is the most expense of all of them."
"You get the value for your money. There aren't any hidden fees."
"After deployment, Citrix Netscaler shifted to a subscription-based license scheme for support, which is slightly more expensive."
"We have a yearly licencing fee, and there are no additional costs."
"Licensing is adequate. I wanted to have a more prominent license, but until I do they don't give enough support. The additional cost would be too much."
"NGINX App Protect is expensive."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."
"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."
"NGINX is not expensive."
"There are no additional fees."
"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."
"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?
I don't know the pricing yet because in my other project, I was not part of the buying side and I was just starting t...
What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?
It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requir...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall
NGINX WAF, NGINX 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.
ABB Schweiz, Aer Lingus, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Amnet Technology Solutions, Aramex International, Ascenty, Atos, Autodesk
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.