NGINX Plus Reviews

NGINX Plus is a part of F5 and can be useful for customers with containers and terminals. Moreover, it's useful for businesses that need application delivery control and enterprise load balancing.

It's lightweight software that can handle heavy loads efficiently.

There is room for improvement in the pricing model. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

The customer service and support is fine. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It took about a week to deploy the solution.

There was an ROI. It's a very useful solution.

The licensing cost is yearly, and it can be quite expensive.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

If you're using a container environment, I would highly recommend it. It's usually a good fit in about 58% of cases.

I use it for eCommerce web servers and to reverse proxy in a different cases. I also use it for high availability, load balancing, and failover.

An example of how this product has improved my organizational functions is the form of how I work in failover cases and how this improves my capability to repair or reestablish communication.

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.

They should do in the open source version of what they did to Advanced HTTP, TCP, and UDP load balancing. They are always creating improvements and working towards new features.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

Their technical support is great.

We previously used Apache2. We switched to NGINX because I read about the better throughput that NGINX offers.

NGINX initial configuration is straightforward.

I do not know about this.

I do not know about this.

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No.

It is a great product. It serves us well and is the best solution. I have been using it since 2012.

In my architecture (which is a microservice architecture with some special advances), NGINX serves multiple purposes. Namely:

• Application Gateway with an application-level firewall tool and load distributor & balancer (also serves for A/B testing).
• Rate limiter and bandwidth limiter (session-based).
• Source of real-time logs, consumed by intrusion detection system.
• "Circuit breaker" for the whole complex of microservices.

No other tool can compare to it.

I have never seen a single case where programmatic tools can change an organization. Tools are not subjects. They are passive objects. Organizations and people are subjects. Tools are just reflections of the organisation and people. Tools mirror people's faces and habits, never vice versa.

NGINX is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles. It is configurable enough so smart engineers (which team consists of) can configure virtually anything which a product manager (say "business") is able to imagine. Even more because business does not always know all the quirks of DevOps and operations.

I am not so happy with their pricing policy, but this is not the worse thing in my life. I can tolerate it.

Stable as a rock. On the stable host OS and stable hardware, your connectivity channels will be saturated (and dead) long before NGINX will mention any difficulties.

No scalability issues at all. Just add more horsepower to the VM. Horizontal scalability also works well, but you definitely need an engineer who knows how to do this and is ready to take his/her part of the responsibility. 

I've never asked for anything. Everything was done in-house.

Before NGINX, there was Squid. I have been using NGINX since its arrival on the market.

Squid is a tool of a different age, from a different (previous) generation. I started using Squid many years ago, from its pre-release beta. It was a good tool for its time and purpose: just caching proxy, which allows you to somehow save on traffic and bandwidth. At these times, the web was mostly static so it worked.

Later, both the capacities of the channels had grown 1,000-10,000 times from megabits to a 10th of gigabits per second. The web moved to mostly dynamic content, so caching proxies lost their appeal.

On the other hand, NGINX is mostly an application level gateway, not a proxy per se. It is a different tool for different tasks.

Get a real good engineer who will do this for your business. I did, and I am happy with it.

Only an in-house team was in the game for implementation. I doubt that the vendor has enough engineers of this level available for assigning them to the kind of customers that we are.

Who calculates "ROI" for every single component of a large system with more than 100 components in it? 

The whole system brought ROI even better than what was expected.

There were not any other real options. 

Squid is too heavy. Apache in reverse proxy mode is also over-bloated, resource hungry, and not suitable for the task.

NGINX is the best available tool today for the tasks it covers.

I use the solution as a reverse proxy. 

The product is lightweight and fast. 

The solution needs to be easier to setup and deploy. 

I have been using the product for two to three years. 

I would rate the product stability a ten out of ten.

I would rate the product scalability an eight out of ten. 

The tool helps us to improve our website speed. 

I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost. 

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. You need to be careful with the product's configurations. It is easy to maintain. 

By far the best solution for web traffic control - in production and just around the house.

We have used it in every project since 2013, setting it as our standard. Our organization is able to use it effectively in multiple applications. 

The most valuable features would be the following:

• Reverse proxy routing
• Authentication
• Caching
• The ability to manipulate requests and responses
• Load balancing, etc. 

I would say ModSecurity 3.0 for NGINX Core, but they just released that. 

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. 

No issues. Never.

No issues. Never.

I have never had to use it. However, the community is very strong and supportive. I often answer people's questions on Reddit, etc. 

When I was young, I used Apache2, because that is all I knew. I switched to NGINX once I learned of it. That's the story. 

The initial setup is straightforward for those who are used to reverse proxies and/or load balancer terminology. The NGINX default install sets up an example web server, modifying it from there is very straightforward, and their documentation is fairly good. 

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. 

I have evaluated many types of products that fall into this category. They are all far less superior than NGINX: F5 BIG-IP, HAProxy, Apache2, and IIS. I am sure the list goes on. 

Install it, test it out, download, and read this free ebook: https://www.nginx.com/resources/library/complete-nginx-cookbook/.

I use this product on AWS. I would suggest the ELB/ALB sandwich model. There is a section in the ebook about this model.

Personally, I have written a book for O'Reilly Media that was sponsored by NGINX, Inc.

NGINX Plus is mainly used as an ingress controller and for API deployment and web servers.

NGINX Plus' most valuable feature is the ingress controller.

I've been working with NGINX Plus for around three years.

NGINX Plus will be stable if the customer does the proper sizing during the design phase. However, if this is not done, there will be challenges and issues.

There are no issues with NGINX Plus' scalability.

NGINX Plus' technical support is good.

NGINX Plus is simple to deploy even during advanced implementation.

NGINX Plus is moderately priced, but it could give better value for money.

I think NGINX Plus is one of the most powerful and fittest solutions in this area, and I'd recommend it to others. I would rate NGINX Plus as eight out of ten.

We use NGINX 1.12.x free version as reverse proxy to Java application servers (WildFly and Tomcat) on single instances, and use it as a load-balancer for our two Keycloak single sign-on instances too. We use AWS EC2 instances here.

We were just Apache 2.0 before NGINX. However, we have not compared the results of both.

Load-balancer feature, because I tried to do same with Apache 2.0 and HAProxy without sucess.

Instance service health check on the NGINX load balancer feature could be improved.

We use NGINX as solution for load balancing our cluster production.

Currently, we don't have any plans to increase the usage because each license costs around $2000 - $2500. 

We use open source nginx.

Their license fee has gone up, so that is one concern that we have. We are looking for alternative solutions which compare well and fit into our budget.

We are interested in an open-source version with the same set of features. We had to do a lot of custom coding around open source NGINX, which we were able to do.

Compared to other similar solutions on the market, I think it's over-priced. If they reduced the price by 50%, then I would definitely like to continue with them.

The scaling should be built into the software rather than configured from an outside source.

Regarding cluster-management, I should be able to provide configuration directly rather than bringing down the software and then updating it and taking it back down again.

Without going offline, if we can manage load balancing as a cluster — meaning I have to bring them down, update them, and then take it back. If that could be more dynamic, that would answer all of my requirements.

I have been using this solution for almost ten years.

NGINX is stable, but scalability-wise, there would be some downtime while managing a cluster of nginx.

There have been multiple occasions where they have taken their sweet time. We had the cheapest license that we could buy from them; because of that, they have a turnaround time of seven days to respond.

Previously, we used Apache and another solution, but I can't remember the name. It took roughly 30 minutes to scale up and down; that's one of the reasons why we switched to NGINX.

The initial setup can be complex. You really have to have a good understanding of their configurations. On a scale from one to five, I consider it a three.

I think installation only took a couple of minutes — no more than 10 minutes.

We implemented it ourselves. 

It takes roughly 10 minutes if I have to change the cluster or upgrade the cluster, but in the same cluster, there's no downtime as such. If I want to add additional systems, it is quite easy.

Only when we want to downsize the load balancers, then we have a little bit of downtime — two to three minutes, max. We do it in the middle of the night.

I would recommend this solution. I think it works for a smaller cluster — it really depends on what your team is trying to achieve.

I think it's a really good product for startup projects of medium size clusters, but once your customer base starts hitting big numbers then managing clusters becomes challenging. If you go beyond the limit, then you'll start to see a negative impact.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of Nine.