F5 BIG-IP LTM and NGINX Plus compete in the traffic management category. F5 BIG-IP LTM seems to have the upper hand with its advanced hardware performance and comprehensive feature set, making it ideal for complex applications.
Features: F5 BIG-IP LTM offers features such as iRules, advanced load balancing, and solid reverse proxy capabilities, making it suitable for high-end deployments. NGINX Plus is noted for its modular approach, efficiency, and ease of implementation, providing excellent reverse proxy routing, caching, and a lightweight alternative.
Room for Improvement: F5 BIG-IP LTM users find it expensive and difficult in deployment complexity, suggesting a pay-as-you-grow licensing model and improved GUI features. NGINX Plus could improve by offering better GUI-based management tools and more comprehensive support, as its advanced features can be costly.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 BIG-IP LTM requires significant configuration effort, yet offers extensive customer support with variable quality. NGINX Plus provides deployment versatility across environments with simplicity in setup being a major advantage, though the free version might lack premium support.
Pricing and ROI: F5 BIG-IP LTM, with high initial costs due to its premium features, often yields significant ROI in large-scale deployments. NGINX Plus features a flexible pricing model, offering a base free version with costlier enhancements appreciated by enterprises seeking efficient traffic management.
The major return on investment is the security of our data.
I would rate the technical support of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) nine out of ten.
Overall, my experience with F5 is very good compared to Radware.
Response time is good because they have assigned and dedicated support engineers to us, and we have weekly cadence calls.
While some people use NGINX for web servers, my current use case focuses on networking and tunneling, which does not necessitate much scaling.
I require ninety-nine point nine percent uptime, and NGINX has been pivotal in helping me achieve this along with our other DNS services.
The pricing of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is on the higher side compared to competitors, but it is worth it.
NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates.
As with any application, there were initial issues, however, after receiving support, everything was rectified.
There were some vulnerabilities in F5.
The product is costly.
My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.
The solution offers a cost advantage.
The impact of SSL offloading on reducing server load and latency is very much positive because whatever traffic we receive, we encrypt at our F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) level, which has definitely reduced the additional load and SSL decryption load on the servers, so it has very much helped us and it is very smooth; it will not take much time and will not impact our regular traffic.
One of the most beneficial features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is its ability to identify compromised traffic and its capabilities in authentication.
For API management, the WebSocket, and the WebServer, NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support.
The web application firewall feature has helped enhance security for our applications because most of the attacks which are performed on our website are being blocked by it.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) | 15.3% |
| NGINX Plus | 6.4% |
| Other | 78.3% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 62 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 32 |
| Large Enterprise | 85 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.
BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.
NGINX Plus is a versatile solution that offers load balancing, caching, proxying, and API deployment capabilities. It can be deployed on private or public clouds and is ideal for building CDN solutions. The solution can also be used to secure web applications and replace web services like Apache.
NGINX has helped organizations improve functioning, reduce downtimes, and offer a DevOps-friendly solution. Its community support and documentation are highly regarded, and its configuration is more straightforward, making it a recommended choice over HAProxy.
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