NGINX App Protect vs NetScaler comparison

NetScaler and F5 are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. NetScaler is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3, while F5 is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.7. Additionally, 91% of NetScaler users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of F5 users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

NetScaler and NGINX App Protect compete in application security and performance delivery. NetScaler seems to have the upper hand due to its wide array of features serving large, diverse environments.

Features: NetScaler offers flexible deployment models with features like SSL offload, multitenancy, and strong integration with Citrix applications. Its configuration allows efficient traffic management crucial for large enterprises. NGINX App Protect shines in traffic management and security with its command-line interface and ease of integration, although it may lack advanced features for user guidance.

Room for Improvement: NetScaler needs to enhance ADC functionalities such as asymmetric content optimization and simplify its setup process. Its advanced feature configurations require streamlining. NGINX App Protect should address configuration complexity and improve its user interface, providing better bot protection and pricing adjustments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetScaler supports both on-prem and hybrid cloud environments with versatile deployment options. However, its technical support has mixed reviews. NGINX App Protect supports diverse configurations but experiences gaps in customer service responsiveness and expertise.

Pricing and ROI: NetScaler is often critiqued for high costs and complex licensing, although users report significant ROI from its feature set. NGINX App Protect, with potentially lower costs, is considered flexible due to instance-based pricing, yet there's a call for better alignment with enterprise budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 845,485 peers since 2012

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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

Read full review

DEMİRHAN ÇAVUŞOĞLU

Cloud Consultant at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

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.

Read full review

Saurav Kumar

Senior security architecture at National Payment Corporation Of India

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"The UI is good."

"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."

"The technical support is good."

"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."

"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."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"Cloudflare has many features."

More Cloudflare pros

"Citrix Web App API Protection allows you to enable a blocking mode"

"It is the best product out there."

"The advantage of Citrix Web App and API Protection is just its graphic user interface for beginners. The solution is nothing special, but we have to use it for the corporation. Another advantage of Citrix Web App and API Protection is that we have our copy to test things and get the know-how of it."

"The load balancing and VPN features are most valuable. AAA authentication is also valuable."

"When our primary link goes down I can still get to my Cisco devices and the NetScaler devices on-prem because of the SDN solution. If the internet connection at one of the branches goes down, we can still route them, they still get internet based on the SDN solution through one of the other sites. They can carry on working."

"Helped us a lot with load balancing."

"Its customer support service is good."

"An 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."

More NetScaler pros

"It is a very good tool for load balancing."

"NGINX App Protect is stable."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its flexibility."

"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."

"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."

"It's very easy to deploy."

"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

More Cloudflare cons

"The vendor provides frequent patches, however, the security of the website has room for improvement."

"Its GUI should be improved. Its CLI is powerful, but GUI needs more features."

"Manageability and adaptability can also be challenging for end customers."

"It was challenging explaining to customers that it's no longer NetScaler but ADC, and now it's not just ADC but also the rebranding from NetScaler."

"Overall the price of Citrix ADC could be more competitive."

"An area for improvement in Citrix Web App and API Protection is for it to give real-time notifications and alerts. It would be practical if the solution warns you if there's an attack or if the load or traffic volume increases or decreases. An additional feature I'd like to see in Citrix Web App and API Protection is a prediction or artificial intelligence on what is happening, for example, attacks."

"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."

"Native integration needs to be improved. You cannot build ISE codes natively. For DevOps, integration would be very helpful because it would be a lot simpler from an operational standpoint."

More NetScaler cons

"As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment."

"The dashboard could provide a more comprehensive view of the status of the connections."

"It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput."

"The integration of NGINX App Protect could improve."

"It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requirements and specifications to deploy the service, to avoid disruptions after implementation."

"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."

"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."

"Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks."

More NGINX App Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"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."

"We are using the free version."

"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."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"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."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It's an expensive product but it works well."

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

"The solution is undoubtedly very good, but it is expensive."

"You get the value for your money. There aren't any hidden fees."

"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

"Price-wise, I feel that the solution is a little bit expensive."

"We get value for money. Its price is fair. I don't think it is overpriced."

"The firewall license is included by default, with no additional costs."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."

"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"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."

"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."

"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."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

845,485 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Educational Organization

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

Retailer

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Citrix ADC?

Citrix NetScaler is a robust product, but mastering it requires significant learning and training due to its complexi...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX App Protect?

It's very easy to deploy.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 12% of the time

HAProxy vs NetScaler

Compared 11% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs NetScaler

Compared 9% of the time

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

Compared 8% of the time

More NetScaler Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 23% of the time

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 17% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 16% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 9% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

March 2025

Download NetScaler product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

March 2025

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“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. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“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.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

One platform for a consistent application delivery and security experience because nobody has time to learn multiple systems to manage ADC deployments. NetScaler is built with a single code base using a software-based architecture, so no matter which ADC form factor you choose — hardware, virtual machine, bare metal, or container — the behavior will be the same.

NetScaler

NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
Complying with security and regulatory requirements

NGINX App Protect offers:

Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security

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

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler

March 2025

Free Report: NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler

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

DOWNLOAD NOW

845,485 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler report.

See our list of best Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors.

We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.