Cloudflare vs NetScaler comparison

The compared Cloudflare and NetScaler solutions aren't in the same category. Cloudflare is ranked #1 in DDOS , with an average rating of 8.4, and holds a 19.4% mindshare in the category. NetScaler is ranked #1 in ADC , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 14.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Cloudflare users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of NetScaler users who would recommend it.

Cloudflare

Read 74 Cloudflare reviews

8,297 Views
6,123 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

NetScaler

Read 107 NetScaler reviews

7,505 Views
5,440 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Cloudflare

NetScaler

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and NetScaler based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection.

To learn more, read our detailed Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 846,617 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

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

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 (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (12th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Cloudflare is designed for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection and holds a mindshare of 19.4%, up 19.2% compared to last year.
NetScaler, on the other hand, focuses on Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), holds 14.8% mindshare, down 15.6% since last year.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."

"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"The tool is user-friendly."

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

More Cloudflare pros

"Citrix is good for application protection."

"For desktop application management, I recommend the NetScaler edition. This product is like a Swiss army knife. Citrix NetScaler ADC supports the education front-end."

"One of the most beneficial features for application delivery is its integration with Citrix Storefront, facilitating user logins and ensuring continuity during data center outages."

"The solution is extremely stable."

"The solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature."

"Content Switching provides flexibility for routing traffic as desired to designated real servers. It also provides good geo capabilities through its GSLB feature."

"The load balancing feature of this solution is very good."

"I prefer this solution because of its user-friendly interface. I find it simple and close to what I am currently using, which is Citrix Fortiva Access for Multi-Factor Authentication. I appreciate the familiar user interface and troubleshooting tools it offers."

More NetScaler pros

Cons

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

"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."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"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."

"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."

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

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

More Cloudflare cons

"I am not an expert in this solution, but simplicity and user-friendly interfaces are crucial for me. I would appreciate advice from Citrix, particularly in the form of an interactive guide for API protection. It would be helpful if they could provide specific points and recommendations for cybersecurity, indicating areas that need attention or improvement. I find such interactive guidance valuable."

"The product could be improved by making it easier to use and easier to implement."

"Integration with other third party providers and third party applications could be better because it can be a bit complex at present."

"I think there is always room for improvement in this type of solutions. For example, I think the GUI should be easy to understand."

"They can improve the scalability and the multi-tenancy feature. We recently tried to configure an authentication, and we ran into some issues while using the web-based GUI. It was very slow when you log in with your credentials in the web-based GUI. Each time we clicked on the menu, it tried to do the authentication. It works properly in the console."

"There are some drawbacks, such as using EUG for specific configurations. It could be improved."

"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."

"Technical support sometimes takes a little longer because of the multilevel ticket priority."

More NetScaler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"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."

"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."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

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

"You can do CapEx and then a yearly monthly fee, or you can do a subscription model, whether that's one month, month-to-month, or three-year subscription model."

"The tool is cheap."

"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."

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

"For the specific use case that my customers primarily engage with, I would give the pricing a rating of seven out of ten."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user68487

Security Expert with 51-200 employees

Nov 6, 2013

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Educational Organization

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...

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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...

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 enters our environment.

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 expensive.

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 complexity. While it could be easier to manage, it is like transitioning from driving a ...

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 11% 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

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

March 2025

Download NetScaler product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler 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

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

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

March 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection 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.