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NGINX App Protect vs NetScaler comparison

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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
8.4
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)
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)
NGINX App Protect
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (15th), Container Security (22nd), API Security (4th)
 

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.
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.
Saurav Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers protection to users from external threats
NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The web application firewall which protects our services on the internet, and then of course services like our ability to provide high availability for the services we are offering are the most valuable features."
"The load balancing and VPN features are most valuable. AAA authentication is also valuable."
"The most valuable feature is load balancing."
"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."
"It is a stable solution. It crashed only once, four years ago...There is a return on investment using the solution."
"Very stable."
"The most valuable feature of Citrix ADC is its ease of use."
"The solution improves security performance."
"It's very easy to deploy."
"The policies are flexible based on the technologies you use."
"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."
"WAF is useful to track mitigation, inclusion, prevention, and the parametric firewall."
"The initial setup was simple and took three to four days."
"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working."
"It is a very good tool for load balancing."
"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."
 

Cons

"DNS Management."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"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."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"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."
"Scripting and writing expressions need to be improved by putting logic behind the rules and improve policies involving some of the scripting part, which is a tedious task to do."
"We would like the licensing model for this product to be improved, as it isn't currently very transparent. There isn't a standard package available, and each extra feature creates an additional cost."
"The security is okay, but the monitoring and reporting need improvement."
"Development team's response time could be better."
"Does not include security. A web application firewall would be a nice addition."
"In every release - and it doesn't matter if it's a minor release or a major release - they keep moving things around and they keep changing the mechanism. So certain things can work in one version one way, and everything works really well, then when you upgrade it to the next version, it breaks everything because they have a new way of doing it."
"Technical support could be improved."
"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."
"As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment."
"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."
"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."
"NGINX App Protect could improve security."
"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."
"Right now, the tool doesn't provide an option revolving around update feeds, specifically the signature update option in the UI."
"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."
"The product's user interface is an area with shortcomings as it can be quite confusing for users, making it an area where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 price of the solution is expensive."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"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."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"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."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"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."
"Price-wise, I feel that the solution is a little bit expensive."
"The client pays for the Citrix NetScaler license annually."
"F5 BIG-IP is much more expensive than Citrix ADC. For example, If we choose two platforms, Citrix ADC, 3000 version, and we choose F5, F4200 version. F5 BIG-IP has connections, timers, and throughput similar to Citrix ADC, but the price is very expensive."
"Ninety day free trial makes it easy to try out this solution."
"NetScaler does the same thing as an F5 and it's cheaper."
"Regarding pricing, while it's expensive, I can't comment on the exact ROI without a budget analysis. However, in terms of service quality, it's worth the price."
"We are quite happy with price. It's not too high."
"You get the value for your money. There aren't any hidden fees."
"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."
"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."
"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."
"There are no additional fees."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."
"NGINX App Protect is expensive."
"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
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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%
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Healthcare 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 needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?
The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model...
 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
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