Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) Reviews

Our company uses the solution to gather user abstractions from their machines, locations, devices, and work areas. Classic use cases include mergers, acquisitions, and work from home scenarios. 

We have a partnership, are resellers, and generally provide services to clients based on their use of the solution. 

The solution effectively brokers a virtual desktop connection. 

Because of the solution's ubiquity, it is easier to find answers to problems than with competitive products. If we have a problem, somebody has blogged it or answered it in a forum. Frequently asked questions and white papers are readily available. 

The sales team does not focus on client needs but instead focuses on selling higher-priced items. 

I have been using the solution for twenty years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is quite scalable. 

Support is no better or worse than other vendors. 

The setup is straightforward. 

We implement the solution for customers. 

I cannot comment on pricing because we have more than a million seats under management so we get the best price. 

Our pricing view is very different than most users. 

It is important to find an integrator who has experience. Do not try to implement the solution yourself. 

I rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

The solution is primarily used for provisioning the desktop for the employees in the company, including different layers of employees. We have different groups using the PVS, the provisioning tool. We are provisioning different groups according to the level, according to the department, et cetera, to deliver a specific desktop for employees who are working at home.

The PVS technology itself, the provisioning, is great. It's very easy. It's very simple to alter the main image or the golden image. 

It's also very secure. 

I find Citrix is a stronger option in many other aspects since it's one of the most mature in the market. It's ancient and it's always developing itself to add new things. 

The initial setup is easy.

Scaling is straightforward. 

We have had issues with certain aspects, which is why we are looking for alternatives. For example, the firewall solution from Citrix is a bit complicated. Integration is hard. It needs a higher understanding of the network. It's not plug-and-play. When I deal with it, I always need assistance from the network team if I need to alter anything. It should be simpler to deal with. 

When I was doing comparison research, the thing that I found really interesting in Horizon is that the firewall setup is easy. It's like a wizard menu, and it's well-documented, so it's not hard to alter anything in the firewall. Maybe the feature that I want to be added to Citrix is well-written documentation and a wizard just to let me know what is going on in the firewall, how to edit things, and how to easily deploy something on the firewall. Do I initiate a rule or decline a rule? They just need to make it easier for me to troubleshoot firewall issues.

We're a company working for a certain customer and the customer has been working with the VDI since it started, so for a very long.

I've been working with it for a year.

The stability is pretty good and there are no real issues. The one concern is the firewall. If there's any error, U2 a firewall error, we were not able to easily modify it or easily solve it due to tissues with integration. You really need higher network knowledge. In the end, security issues or any issues on the firewall will affect the stability in the end. 

We are always adding new PVS machines. As an operator, we're always asked to add new PVS machines to batch them, update them, add new machines, and add new images. It has been very easy to scale and everything is a click away. There are no issues while scaling.

The organization is huge, so I cannot say exactly how many people are using the solution. The organization has around 750 servers. On each server, there may be hundreds of machines. There are lots of users. There are maybe tens of thousands of end users actually using the desktop as a service through Citrix.

We don't really deal with technical support. All errors that we face, we are able to detect ourselves as an operator. We don't open any tickets with Citrix support itself. We don't have any experience with the support that Citrix provides.

Since the start we were working on Citrix.

It is straightforward to set up and implement. 

I participated in editing something in the image itself or while provisioning. That said, the main deployment happened long ago, and we are operators, so we were not really in the middle of the actual process of the deployment. 

The errors that we had during maintenance are typically all due to the firewall and its networking of it. Other than that, things are smooth, and all the errors are detectable. If it's an error in configuration and any other aspects except, of course, the networking of the firewall, it may be difficult. Otherwise, for other aspects, everything is easy to maintain.

I'm the operator for a customer, so I'm not really aware of the licenses. They do the deal with Citrix and we just operate the infrastructure or the VDI. I don't really know how much it costs in reality.

I was comparing this product against Horizon. I wanted to compare both solutions in case we need to migrate from one solution to another.

The company wants to migrate to the cloud so that's why we are searching for an alternative - to see if we should replace Citrix or keep on working on Citrix.

We are working with Citrix VDI, and we are mainly working on the PTS for provisioning.

I'm a system integrator. I'm dealing with the latest version of the product.

It's a very well-known solution, and it's very efficient. However, you need to dig deep into the architecture of it just to understand it and grasp it well, especially how things are calling one another, how things are operating inside the APIs and all the networking inside, and how things are working in the architecture to be able to work with Citrix and actually understand everything that's going on it. 

If you face any error, you'll be able to know the cause and easily go to the root cause. However, you must first understand the architecture, understand how things are calling one another, and how the networks play. Then, start step-by-step working on it, on the application itself. If you have good knowledge, you'll find working with it very easy.

I'd rate the solution a seven out of ten based on the fact that we did rin into a lot of issues related to the firewall. Other than that, Citrix works fine. 

If you have a desktop, laptop, or device that can be distributed to end users, to any kind of inconsistency in the institution, we deploy the solution so that anybody can get whatever resource is required. It helps ensure access. It makes it easy for us to give storage, memory, RAM, or processor resources without anything affecting their day-to-day activity. It makes it simple and easy for our institution to provide the kind of activity to the users.

The product is ideal for sharing an application for different resources. For instance, let's say we have a Microsoft Office product and want to share the Microsoft Office product with everyone simultaneously. That can easily be done. 

With this product, everyone can have a similar kind of desktop environment. So it's a virtual environment, the desktop environment. They can do whatever they need in that environment, and different kinds of users can access different kinds of applications. 

The product is scalable. 

If there are connectivity issues, there are stability issues. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable and reliable. However, it depends on the network infrastructure. If we have a stable network infrastructure, then it's stable. That said, if the infrastructure is not stable, I don't recommend this product. If there is an interruption, it might not actually be available to the user, which could cause issues.

The solution is scalable. 

Right now, we have 1,100 virtual workspaces, and we are planning to add 1,500 more. 

We do not use a different type of service right now. 

In terms of handling the setup process, we need planning since it is a bit complex. We need to know the infrastructure itself. The hardware resources can also be a bit expensive, and the licensing might also depend on the number of users that the organization has. Therefore, it is a bit expensive, the initial deployment. The cost of RAM after the deployment is much less.

It needs a proper professional to deploy everything. It also requires the engagement of Citrix. Three to six months is enough to deploy it as the hardware might first actually need to be available. Still, once you have that resource, deploying Citrix also might take additional time.

While internally, it can be managed by an in-house staff, the deployment cannot. It requires proper capacity building to do even the deployment. It is a little bit challenging, so I recommend the setup be done by the consultant. 

The initial setup requires a specific supplier or consultant to handle everything. It can't be done in-house.

In January 2020 they changed the licensing scheme and they're also changing the on-prem licensing scheme to be subscription-based as well. It can be tricky. I don't know why they did that. Maybe it's the marketing strategy. I don't know. The subscription is for three years or five years. If you procure three years subscription, you can use the license, after three years, they'll block it, which can be a challenge if you aren't paying attention to when licensing renewals are due. 

We last updated about a year ago. We are on the 2021 version.

I recommend the solution, however, it depends on the organization's use case. Let's say if that organization needs to share the resource equally through the users or staff they have, then I recommend it. 

I'd rate it nine out of ten.

We use Citrix for VDI and publishing applications. My company only has 50 users, but some of my customers have more than 10,000 users.

Remote access is useful.  

Citrix is a highly mature product, but they could always add more benefits by acquiring a third-party software product to integrate with their their solution and make it more complete.

I think they can improve the troubleshooting to make it easier for users to solve problems on their own. For example, it could provide an error code and some instructions on how to reconnect to the database or do something proactive to fix the issue with the system.

I have been using Citrix for more than 20 years.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a backbone platform that organizations rely on. If Citrix is down, then the organization can't function, so it must be a stable solution. If we are working in a thousand-user organization and Citrix goes down, then 1000 employees are left idle.

If you can afford the licenses, you can scale Citrix up as much as you want. 

The initial setup is easy and only takes two or three hours. The most complex task is coordinating between the golden image and organizational resources. You need to install all the organization's applications and adjust the settings to meet the company's needs. Setting up a Citrix farm takes less than five hours, but tailoring it to the organization requires another three or four days.

The Citrix license model has changed. It costs around $240 per user for a single username, but a concurrent license costs double.

I rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops nine out of 10. This is the leading solution in the world for remote work. Citrix has had the top remote display for the last 20 years, and there is a huge technological gap between Citrix and its competitors. However, Citrix doesn't have the same level of marketing as its competitors. Many times, people don't realize that Citrix is the best until they've deployed it.

I recommend taking advantage of Citrix eLearning online courses. Four or five days of online training can help you overcome a lot of shortcomings, but you need two or three years of experience working with the Citrix system and infrastructure to be a system admin. 

The Citrix Workspace is a little easier compared to Citrix Receiver. We used to use Citrix Receiver and then switched to Citrix Workspace. Previously, we had to install five browser components and a couple more things to launch these applications.

Six to seven months after we started using this solution, we had an issue when we were using the Citrix server. We needed to install the Citrix Runtime in the server where the application was hosted. When we installed the Runtime, we needed to restart the production server. So, whenever our EMR application was going live, we had to plan to upgrade all our other surrounding tools and applications, so we could complete one restart and achieve everything at once.

The engineering team installed certain things to fix the issue, and now it is resolved. There are so many links within the Citrix application, so when we tried to launch it, we initially used IE. Initially, we never had an issue, but when we made Chrome an enterprise browser, then we were facing some slowness. But later, we realized that it was not a Citrix issue, it was some additional components of the browser that we needed to install so that it would be rightly redirected to the EFC.

We have been using this solution for ten years from a configuration perspective and almost three years from an automation perspective. We are using the latest version.

We are planning our next upgrade around mid-September. The solution is deployed on-premises.

It is a stable solution.

We have more than 500 people using this solution.

We have not used the technical support from Citrix. However, we reach out to our technical team for any issues.

I rate the pricing a five out of five because it is a good price.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. We have been using this solution for a long time and are comfortable using Citrix.

We were looking for a way to deliver the desktop to the end-user securely and within a short time. We leverage their cloud-hosted desktop virtualization.

We use Azure Cloud and, in terms of laptops, we give them to our employees but, because of the COVID situation, sometimes they work from home using their personal laptops to connect to the office environment. They use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as a medium.

Before we used the solution, when an employee would join our company it would take us between seven and 14 days to completely configure and give them a laptop. Now, within a maximum of one day they get their computer and can start working on that system. It has simplified things for us.

The solution also simplifies our adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. For data protection, we have watermarking enabled and the solution opens in full-screen mode so that end-users cannot toggle between VDA and their desktops. The solution also disables use of the clipboard to copy data from the VDA desktop to an endpoint device. Moreover, there is an option to disable even taking a screenshot of the virtual desktop. All of these features help with data protection.

For compliance, we have our own URL to access our desktop server. We can also create a tenant-based method for deploying the virtual desktop for each project, and we can group them. Also, the communication between the endpoint and the virtual desktop is encrypted end-to-end. All communication is over SSL and TLS connections.

The most valuable feature is the watermark because most of the time our employees connect from a remote location. In case they photograph the DDA or some data, the watermark will show which user did so and from which IP they connected. That makes it more secure.

The solution also provides us with flexibility so that it can be used on any device. We mostly have Mac and Windows machines.

In addition, Citrix uses its ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) protocol and for end-users with less bandwidth, the Citrix connectivity enables them to work.

They need to adapt more quickly to the latest additions to the Microsoft operating system. If Windows 10 comes out with a new version, there are compatibility issues and it takes them a lot of time to release an update.

Also, even though they support Linux, as with Windows, we are not able to use the latest version. They need to bring more simplicity to the Linux Virtual Desktop.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for one year.

We don't have that many users, but the scalability is good. If required, there is no limit on the number of users. Currently, we have about 5,000 users on virtual desktops and about 1,000 are using Citrix.

In terms of support they are lagging. They take a lot of time to respond. Once they connect, they take a lot of time to resolve things, especially when moving things from L1 to L2 and L2 to L3. Their backend people keep on changing and it can be annoying for us. It is not that easy to get support. The support is not that great, although it has improved when compared to a year ago.

Neutral

Once we put it on a Cloud Connector, and if we are using a test cloud, it is very easy to deploy. If you want to deploy the ADC, then it takes some time to consider things, but otherwise deployment of Citrix consists of simple steps.

Because we are deployed in the cloud, it took us some time to configure the ADC. The rest of the components were deployed in a week's time, but the ADC took a lot of time, because there were a lot of compatibility issues. We followed the documentation, but it took some time for us to settle the configuration. The ADC is used to connect Citrix to the end-user system so it is a critical component. Deploying the ADC on the cloud is a complex process.

From the time we entered into an agreement to use Virtual Apps and Desktops, it took about six weeks to eight weeks until we could use it. On our end, there were two or three IT people involved.

The Citrix integrator we used was moderately helpful. They tried to help but they didn't have much experience with a cloud deployment. They were able to do on-prem fast, but GCP took them a lot of time.

Our deployment is in its initial stage so we cannot say there have been cost savings, but in terms of security, it is good. It has also improved the efficiency of our IT department by approximately 20 percent.

The pricing is a little bit high, but it's good value for the product's stability and efficiency.

You need to choose the right licensing, whether it is the Advanced or Premium Edition.

We have used Azure Virtual Desktop and some other solutions as well, but compared to all of them, in terms of the performance, the screen refresh, and security, Citrix is number-one.

Citrix is an enterprise leader for virtual desktops. We cannot compare Citrix options, usability, and simplicity with Azure Virtual Desktop. With Azure Virtual Desktop, there is a lot of slowness and audio will not work. When it comes to an enterprise-grade or first-class option, you need to look at Citrix.

You need to think about ADC. If you are planning a deployment in the cloud, you need to be well aware of what will work and what will not work with ADC. Otherwise, it will be difficult.

My primary use cases for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are for:

• Anyone who wants to modernize their business continuity plan
• Anyone who wants to deal with data regulation compliance
• Anybody who wants to promote a work from home or remote-first strategy for their employees and team members.

In terms of the hardware and software that the service requires our company to make use of, we can typically decommission if our client has existing servers. We can decommission after moving the data off of them. 

My firm is hardware apathetic. I don't care if it runs Citrix Workspace. If our clients want low cost and high performance, we generally point people to the Ncomputing RX420(HDX) which is a Raspberry PI 4 device that mounts very neatly onto the back of the monitor and it can link into their network via wifi or ethernet connection.

It's a fantastic little device that is very manageable, cost-effective, and tends to last for quite a long time. Every time I've put them into place, the desktop environment is a little bit different than what people are used to. The mouse movements are not quite as good as a full house computer, but we're spending a couple of hundred dollars for something that's going to last five to 10 years, versus buying a desktop or even a lightweight desktop for $600 or $700 which is going to last three to five years. Most of my clients have been pretty excited about that trade-off.

There have been radical improvements in IT efficiency. Cost savings are on a case-by-case basis. Some of my clients were not going all-in on any kind of management solution, so their initial monthly cost was higher when they went to Citrix. In most cases, it's a push. They're spending about the same money in either direction. But in a lot of cases, when you start to factor in the cost of downtime, the cost of inefficiency, the cost of a data breach, everyone is realizing much lower costs of management and ongoing costs to their IT department.

It's difficult to approximate how much it has saved because on one hand, I have a client that has 45 or 50 users and they realized a much higher increase of efficiency. A task in the previous model took half an hour, and under the new model, it takes five minutes.

When you spread that over 50 employees, that's a much higher percentage of drop than if a client has 10 employees. It's difficult to approximate but averaged across all of our clients, there is around a 25-to-30% reduction in costs.

We leverage the following technologies: 

• Application virtualization capabilities
• On-premises, desktop virtualization
• Cloud-hosted desktop virtualization
• Citrix managed cloud-hosted desktops

The fact that we can work from any device from any location is the most valuable aspect of the solution for us. In the last year, people have been restricted in their movements and we haven't been allowed to just show up to work. The fact that my clients can leverage a remote-first workplace that allows them a greater ability to recruit from a larger geographic area is valuable for us. 

You don't have to be able to commute to a major Metro in order to work there, you can work from any location. If you want to take a few days with your family but you have some projects that you're working on, it's going to take some of your time, but not all of it. You can just go to your Airbnb or wherever your family is staying and work remotely, do your job, and spend the rest of the time with your family.

Team members are relieved that they can continue to work and put bread on the table. They are relieved in the dichotomy that says they can put their family's needs ahead of their workplace's needs or vice versa. Maybe a child has a medical appointment or a social engagement that they would like to be at. You can fit those around your work schedule, work it out with your children and with wherever it is that they're going. In that way, both the employer and the employee realize a lower cost of operations. They realize increased flexibility and agility in their life. That dichotomy is either minimized or removed entirely. That's been very, very groundbreaking for them.

The deployment and management of hybrid Cloud Apps and Desktops is not 100% seamless, although it is very good. When you start mixing a third-party or a cloud-hosted app, it is generally pretty seamless. You don't notice a difference between a web-based app that you run on a physical machine, on a virtual machine, or through a Workspace. I have not seen any problems with that. A legacy application or a computer-aided design program has very specific requirements that can be a challenge. But with a little bit of research, once you settle on the solution, it's pretty good.

Security is a shining point of the Citrix Workspace. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a very robust solution when security is a concern. Furthermore, the content collaboration data-hosting that Citrix integrates with Virtual Apps and Desktops is among the best there is.

It is the same for the security of clients' intellectual property and data when remote employees use the solution. Content collaboration allows you to share data securely and is supported with two-factor authentication. You can have a consolidated data set with a widely distributed workforce and they can all be on the same sheet of music, all accessing the same data. Version control, access control lists, anything you could wish for, is available in their solution stack.

Citrix simplifies the adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. HIPAA, for example, if you share that data over two or three different clinics or facilities, you have to create and maintain some sort of SD-WAN or VPN in order to make sure that those applications and those datasets are shared only between those locations. With Virtual Apps and Desktops, that either reduces or removes the need for either the VPN or an SD-WAN, because they aren't actually sharing between various locations. You are accessing that data set through various locations. The benefit to that is that you have reduced complexity at the infrastructure level so there's less to troubleshoot. There's less to go wrong.

Templating the deployment process could use improvement. When you start, there are a large number of details that are quite client-specific, although they do share common themes. To get somebody up and running in a day is very difficult to do. They should streamline by use case.

There's always going to be an outlier that doesn't really fit neatly into any one use case, so that's going to have to be more customized. An accountancy firm has sensitive data. They are prime targets for identity thieves that are always looking for an easy target and low-hanging fruit. If they were to template a deployment for an accountancy firm with all the needful things that every accountancy firm is going to have to have, it should be that you can just radio button the Apps so that accountants can tell the backend that they're going to need certain things. Then you can say, "We have this number of users and they need this number of spare desktops - go." And it just built the Azure environment. That would be really great. I don't know that it's actually possible, but it would be really good. 

The other issue is the stocking orders and the monthly reports. They're difficult because we don't do it every day. We do the stocking order once a year and there's always confusion on the backend.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for Azure for a little more than a year now. 

I would rate their support highly. They're very good and very responsive. We had an incident last year that dragged on and on but that was in the thick of having half the workforce that they were used to having and a radically increased call for service because of the pandemic. That's not really a true representation of what they could do. 

Most of the time, if there's an issue, I can fire it off to one of my account managers or through the Citrix portal and get a response back within, depending on the severity of the incident, a few minutes or up to the next business day. Depending on the severity of the problem, the next business day might be just fine. If it's just a little slow and it's irritating, but it's not causing anybody to not be able to work, the next business day is fine. If we're down and we need help right now, having 24-hour support would be excellent but that's kind of impossible.

I've had a client on board with me that was moving from another Citrix provider. They were working on hosting their own Citrix environment and they needed something that wasn't going to fall apart on them. Their customer service really flagged over the last year or so. They moved from a Citrix provider to me.

The deployment strategy widely varies between clients because, on one hand, I have an accountancy firm as well as another very similar solution for a defined benefits management firm. They have very similar needs but their business model is such that even though they've got the same needs, the way I have to meet those needs for each different client throws a monkey wrench into it. 

On the other hand, I have construction companies and engineering firms that could not be more different and customizing the solution for each of them and their needs is challenging. I can get the bones of the infrastructure up in two or three days. Then it takes another two or three days, at minimum, as much as maybe a week or two, to get everything dialed in just the way they like it before we start going into production.

The shortest amount of time I've seen it take to complete implementation is a week but it has taken a lot longer. 

I have seen ROI. It's opened me up as an outsourced IT department to seek and win much more lucrative contracts. Citrix has allowed me to pursue larger clients. Because when you are all on the same sheet of music with how this solution works, how it's supported, where you can deploy, and how onsite support really becomes almost a non-issue, you can seek clientele from every location, not just where you can drive to. It's allowed me to scale quite a lot.

My pricing advice would be to watch your Azure costs. If you're not used to it, like I wasn't last year, they can get very high very quickly and you can go upside down on your agreement very easily.

There is a steep learning curve. In the Cloud-hosted Virtual Apps and Desktops model, as a general rule, there's a high learning curve. If you're going from only providing local assets to your clients, a local server, local workstations, and you're going straight into Virtual Apps and Desktops for the Cloud in Azure, really do your homework. Really learn the tool, really understand how it's supported because you'll save yourself a lot of trouble down the line if you do. If you've got the resources available, throw one person at cost analysis for Azure. So that at least one person in your organization really understands how much something is going to cost to deploy and keep running so that you can size your agreements correctly.

If I could, I would rate Virtual Apps and Desktops an 11 out of 10. I will rate it a ten out of ten. 

I use the solution in my company to provide virtualized applications to users, especially to remote workforce. The tool provides good data center security, so a lot of operations can be done through Citrix Workspace since it is available like a sandbox. It is basically a robust virtual desktop solution.

The ability to provide virtualized apps and desktops is the most effective or beneficial feature of the product for our company.

The benefits provided to our company by the solution stem from the fact that it saves a lot of time for our IT team when dealing with the provisioning of desktops in our environment. The product also makes our company feel a lot more secure. The product was really secure to use for remote work, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Apart from the areas revolving around virtualized desktops and Citrix NetScaler SDX, the product also offers an overall good user experience, allowing users to take care of the setups of virtualized desktops.

Citrix Workspace needs to improve and offer a better QA. The product has some bugs, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The product should have some new releases to deal with bugs that would cause downtime. The product should invest in testing processes before new releases.

The setup process needs to be made easy.

The product's licensing costs need to be made cheaper.

I have been using Citrix Workspace for eight years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a very scalable solution.

I have experience with the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The product's initial setup phase is complex.

My company opts for the yearly subscription model to pay towards the licensing costs attached to the solution.

In my company's daily operations, we use the product to provide virtualized desktops to users. The tool eases up the replacement of PCs. It also requires very less physical parts, making it a greener product.

The product helps in the functioning of remote or hybrid work in our company since once it is implemented in the environment, it is much safer to use when compared to VPNs. Users can access the data center with the help of the product since they just get to use the screen, and it is a lot more secure than the offerings from the other solution.

To get the ability of the security aspect of Citrix Workspace to meet the organizational needs, our company needs to put in a bit of effort. It is not an easy solution when it comes to the security aspect.

The automation capabilities of the product that streamlines processes is not an area that is required much since our organization does not deal with a lot of automation involving Citrix Workspace.

I recommend the product to others who plan to use it. Before opting for the product's implementation, one should be aware of their hardware and have really good sizing capabilities.

I rate the product's integration capabilities a seven out of ten, considering it integrates well with other products.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.