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F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition vs LoadBalancer Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.6
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition delivers ROI through cost savings, enhanced performance, security, and operational efficiency with integrated modules.
Sentiment score
5.1
LoadBalancer Enterprise enhanced reliability, reduced costs, improved productivity, and boosted customer satisfaction, crucial for business operations in VoIP.
Overall, I can say the ROI includes a twenty-five to thirty percent cost reduction, with some areas achieving forty percent cost reduction in our expenses.
Network Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is a significant performance improvement in the website and website speed.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
With F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition, we have not faced any RMAs, which has made a positive operational impact.
Senior Network And Security Engineer at Mobily
There are very lesser downtimes in terms of my overall data, including software deployment, development, and testing cycles.
Sr QA Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
One of the reasons why we went for LoadBalancer Enterprise is because of losing revenue when services are not available.
Senior Team Lead Systems Administrator at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition customer service is praised for professionalism and speed, but concerns exist over response times and costs.
Sentiment score
7.4
LoadBalancer Enterprise support is praised for 24/7 availability, expertise, quick resolutions, and being highly rated despite occasional coordination issues.
I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as a perfect ten based on all of the experience I have had so far.
Senior Network And Security Engineer at Mobily
I rate customer support a 10 out of 10, as they are knowledgeable and provide straightforward troubleshooting.
Network Engineer at Thryv
Customer support for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is excellent.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
I can expect a response within fifteen to twenty minutes after I put in a ticket to release the license.
Senior Network At Dxc Technology Professional at DXC Technology
They respond immediately when we do reach out.
Senior Information Technology Security Consultant at Mideast Data Systems
I would rate LoadBalancer Enterprise's customer support at nine out of ten.
Senior L3 Cloud Platform Network & Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.2
F5 BIG-IP VE efficiently scales in cloud and on-premise, though high-load issues occur, yet remains flexible and reliable.
Sentiment score
7.4
LoadBalancer Enterprise scales efficiently with easy server management, flexible licensing, and minor cost limitations, suiting various business sizes.
It is the most scalable and reliable system.
Cybersecurity Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Within ten minutes of time, we can scale and boot as many virtual machines as needed in the environment.
Network Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Being a virtual edition, we were able to scale resources such as CPU, memory, and throughput based on our demand without major architectural changes.
Network Security Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
LoadBalancer Enterprise is easy to scale, maintain, and modify, which makes adding or removing servers a simple process.
Senior Information Technology Security Consultant at Mideast Data Systems
LoadBalancer Enterprise ensures that it distributes the load properly so that the system is not broken.
Sr QA Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I rate the scalability of LoadBalancer Enterprise as excellent since it adapts perfectly to increased traffic volume or the addition of new applications.
ingénieur réseau at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is stable and reliable, with benefits like enhanced performance and uptime, despite occasional high-load issues.
Sentiment score
8.0
LoadBalancer Enterprise maintains high stability with minimal disruptions, efficient issue resolution, seamless failover, and controlled upgrades appreciated by users.
The load balancing module still performed admirably.
Sr network engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
The performance increased significantly and the response times of the application improved.
Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The uptime improvements with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition are almost close to 100%, as it only goes down if a failover happens.
Sr. Consutant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The regular health checks that LoadBalancer Enterprise performs using regular Jenkins jobs utilize all the functionalities of LoadBalancer Enterprise to make sure everything is working perfectly according to my design.
Sr QA Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
In 90% to 99% of cases, I can say it is seamless.
Senior Information Technology Security Consultant at Mideast Data Systems
LoadBalancer Enterprise is stable.
Senior L3 Cloud Platform Network & Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

F5 BIG-IP VE requires improvements in security, features, integration, and support with better pricing, training, and simplified licensing.
LoadBalancer Enterprise needs setup simplification, enhanced security, scalability, pricing adjustments, better analytics, documentation, vendor integration, and easier configurations.
The primary concern I noted regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is its scalability during high-load situations.
Sr network engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
It is a somewhat expensive solution, and the price needs to be improved based on what our customers have told us.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
With FortiWeb, we have a dashboard where I can check the policy status with just one click, and everything is easily accessible.
Senior Network And Security Engineer at Mobily
If advanced features such as iRules are required, and complete detailed WAF monitoring is desired along with policies that can be learned and then implemented afterwards as you have in F5, then LoadBalancer Enterprise lacks these capabilities.
Senior L3 Cloud Platform Network & Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Documentation needs improvement because having information is essential for working with advanced configurations.
Senior Information Technology Security Consultant at Mideast Data Systems
LoadBalancer Enterprise could work more on content caching by bypassing the back-end server more often and making the cache more accessible so that it gives better and more robust results.
Sr QA Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

F5 BIG-IP VE offers valuable scalability and security despite high licensing costs, comparing favorably to alternatives like FortiWeb.
LoadBalancer Enterprise offers cost-effective pricing and flexibility, with annual support, making it valued among enterprise users despite not being the cheapest.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's pricing structure was significantly more advantageous and aligned with our budgetary considerations.
Sr network engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
My experience with pricing and setup costs for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition was mixed, as they do not have an option for 10 gig licensing, which was costly for us.
Analyst at Accenture
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition solves a very significant problem of high availability and performance.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
The setup cost is cheap and licensing is also reasonably priced.
Senior Information Technology Security Consultant at Mideast Data Systems
Regarding the pricing of LoadBalancer Enterprise, I only pay for a license, and whatever license I use doesn't require the same CAPEX investment as physical hardware.
Senior Network At Dxc Technology Professional at DXC Technology
The cost of LoadBalancer Enterprise is better and a bit cheaper compared to other products.
Senior L3 Cloud Platform Network & Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition offers scalable load balancing, SSL offloading, and security features, enhancing performance, uptime, and cost-efficiency.
LoadBalancer Enterprise offers efficient load distribution, scalability, user-friendly interface, advanced routing, and seamless integration for high availability.
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition helped our customers increase the high availability and performance of their applications, specifically their web applications.
IT consultant at Beginning Solutions IT
If ten thousand, fifty thousand, or even a million people want to access the application simultaneously, we have configured auto-scalability.
Network Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition has impacted my organization positively with cost savings by saving public IP addresses, and its performance and stability, which give almost 100% uptime for the application because we have high availability.
Sr. Consutant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Now, we achieve about 99% availability across all servers thanks to the health check feature in the load balancer.
Senior Information Technology Security Consultant at Mideast Data Systems
LoadBalancer Enterprise simulates production traffic profiles by using a realistic traffic generator that models different requests and transaction mixes such as reads and writes, leveraging replay traffic from sanitized production traces whenever possible.
Sr QA Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
LoadBalancer Enterprise has impacted my organization positively by making our applications and services available to all users across the globe.
Senior Team Lead Systems Administrator at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
LoadBalancer Enterprise
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is 1.8%. The mindshare of LoadBalancer Enterprise is 4.9%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition1.8%
LoadBalancer Enterprise4.9%
Other93.3%
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2800392 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cloud deployment has simplified traffic distribution and now supports flexible multi-zone DR
Regarding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition's improvement areas, the current dashboard is very useful, but I believe the registration process should be simplified in the virtual edition. Especially in the Azure environment, many features are not currently aligned and working with Azure. We need to make efforts to ensure it is well integrated with Azure. Currently, if we want to integrate route tables with the virtual F5 edition, we need to deploy scripting inside the virtual F5 instances, and then that script performs the virtual IP route table changes in the Azure environment. This feature should be auto-configured, and efforts are needed to ensure the virtual edition is very much aligned with the Azure environment. I am expecting this improvement in the next edition. The failover capability is also not as good as it should be. We have tested the failover functionality, and sometimes we have observed that failover fails. F5 does not successfully fail over to other instances perfectly, so that also needs to be improved. Security should also be enhanced, as in the past I have seen some security loopholes. Tightening of security should be included in the new software. These improvements should be present in near future editions.
SM
Senior L3 Cloud Platform Network & Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
High availability and strong security have supported our apps but advanced traffic control still improves
LoadBalancer Enterprise can be improved because the layer seven programmability is not as powerful as it could be. We cannot write code and programming on it. Additionally, access management and identity options are not available here like they are in F5 VPN. The WAF depth and analytics, such as in-depth logs and the WAF learning option that we have in other load balancers, are much easier to configure and to harden the policies and polish them. That option is not here. Fine-tuning is a bit difficult compared to other solutions. The automation and API maturity does not appear to be at the level of other load balancers. The main limitation is that there is nothing here with regards to F5 APM. There is no iRules option or policy option to manipulate the traffic according to requirements, which is a bit difficult. If an organization is basic and does not want very advanced features, then it is acceptable. However, if advanced features such as iRules are required, and complete detailed WAF monitoring is desired along with policies that can be learned and then implemented afterwards as you have in F5, then LoadBalancer Enterprise lacks these capabilities.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
Sometimes customers assume vulnerability points in F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition represent actual vulnerabilities, but they are false positives in that particular environment. In customer scans where m...
What advice do you have for others considering F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
I am currently working on different types of projects. I am handling SSL Orchestrator in a bank project and mainly handling load balancing in telecom projects. The value of my experience depends on...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition?
Regarding pricing, I believe it is high, but the setup cost is low and licensing is fine, though I do not have the complete analysis from our sales team. I understand that F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition...
Do you recommend Loadbalancer.org?
Since Loadbalancer.org is an open-source solution, I would recommend this solution for smaller businesses that don’t have major scaling requirements and don’t have the budget for a commercial solut...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Loadbalancer.org?
I purchased LoadBalancer Enterprise through the AWS marketplace. With the licensing and setup cost, I think it is pretty good, but the overall cost is not something I am aware of. That is handled b...
What needs improvement with Loadbalancer.org?
LoadBalancer Enterprise could provide more flexibility in terms of configuration setup, making it more user-friendly when switching between other software. LoadBalancer Enterprise could work more o...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Vodafone, NASA, Mercedes, NBC, Siemens, AT&T, Barclays, Zurich, Penn State University, Fiserv, Canon, Toyota, University of Cambridge, US Army, US Navy, Ocean Spray, ASOS, Pfizer, BBC, Bacardi, Monsoon, River Island, U.S Air Force, King's College London, NHS, Ricoh, Philips, Santander, TATA Communications, Ericcson, Ross Video, Evertz, TalkTalk TV, Giacom, Rapid Host.
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition vs. LoadBalancer Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.