NGINX App Protect vs NetScaler comparison

NetScaler and F5 are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. NetScaler is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3, while F5 is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.7. Additionally, 91% of NetScaler users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

NetScaler and NGINX App Protect compete in application security and performance delivery. NetScaler seems to have the upper hand due to its wide array of features serving large, diverse environments.

Features: NetScaler offers flexible deployment models with features like SSL offload, multitenancy, and strong integration with Citrix applications. Its configuration allows efficient traffic management crucial for large enterprises. NGINX App Protect shines in traffic management and security with its command-line interface and ease of integration, although it may lack advanced features for user guidance.

Room for Improvement: NetScaler needs to enhance ADC functionalities such as asymmetric content optimization and simplify its setup process. Its advanced feature configurations require streamlining. NGINX App Protect should address configuration complexity and improve its user interface, providing better bot protection and pricing adjustments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetScaler supports both on-prem and hybrid cloud environments with versatile deployment options. However, its technical support has mixed reviews. NGINX App Protect supports diverse configurations but experiences gaps in customer service responsiveness and expertise.

Pricing and ROI: NetScaler is often critiqued for high costs and complex licensing, although users report significant ROI from its feature set. NGINX App Protect, with potentially lower costs, is considered flexible due to instance-based pricing, yet there's a call for better alignment with enterprise budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler

March 2025

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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

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.

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Saurav Kumar

Senior security architecture at National Payment Corporation Of India

Offers protection to users from external threats

NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

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

"It's very user-friendly."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

"High availability, performance, and security are the main pillars. It enhances the security for accessing the applications."

"The GSLB feature allows us to move services between data centers. We can do this in either a planned or unplanned manner. We have experienced service provider outages at our primary data center and GSLB will kick in to automatically modify DNS records to point to a secondary data center (active/passive). We also make use of GeoIP information to point clients to the closest data center for accessing applications."

"HTTP analysis and action. We have a lot of custom web applications that sometimes require custom header insertions. Some of these custom apps are external and, via the content switching, we can use one IP and leverage various back-end web app servers."

"The most valuable features are for the ADMs and the overall monitoring environment."

"It's very easy to configure."

"I would say the rewriting and redirection functions are must-have's for us."

"The maintenance of the solution is not complex."

More NetScaler pros

"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."

"It has the best documentation features."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its open source."

"The most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found."

"We were looking for a product that is capable of complete automation and a container based solution. It's working."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."

"The tool's most valuable feature is the OWASP certification. Additionally, the tool's ability to enforce strong passwords and OTP within minutes is impressive. With its analytics and recommendations, it is a very good solution."

"I tested specific features and evaluated the solution against the Web Application Firewall. I conducted research to test different detection percentages. I did not use it directly for protection but for evaluation purposes."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"Support response time could be improved."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"DNS Management."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"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."

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

More Cloudflare cons

"Citrix is more expensive than Horizon."

"There are certain features that are very useful and Citrix makes you pay a bit more for them."

"Currently, the support team's responsiveness is lacking, and the technical personnel on calls often seem unfamiliar with the issues or inadequately trained."

"Development team's response time could be better."

"I would like to see multifactor authentication added to this solution to improve the security."

"I would like to see support for scripting, like "iRule", which gives you the option to implement any configuration which is not available out of the box."

"Needs configuration processes like disabling LB VIPs, automatically disabling the IPs used."

"Currently, it is not easy to use the configuration capabilities of the product."

More NetScaler cons

"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."

"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."

"The configuration needs to be more flexible because it is difficult to do things that are outside of the ordinary."

"Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time."

"The dashboard could provide a more comprehensive view of the status of the connections."

"As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment."

"The solution needs to be improved in the e-commerce portal."

"It doesn't have more advanced features like no false-positive security, which you can configure in Advanced WAF."

More NGINX App Protect 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."

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

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

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

"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 think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"Ninety day free trial makes it easy to try out this solution."

"You get the value for your money. There aren't any hidden fees."

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

"Its price is comparable to others and affordable."

"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."

"The firewall license is included by default, with no additional costs."

"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."

More NetScaler pricing and cost advice

"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."

"The product's price is high."

"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."

"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."

"There are no additional fees."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."

"NGINX is not expensive."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Educational Organization

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

Retailer

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 GR...

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...

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 ente...

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...

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 complexi...

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What do you like most about NGINX App Protect?

It's very easy to deploy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?

I don't know the pricing yet because in my other project, I was not part of the buying side and I was just starting t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requir...

See all answers

Comparisons

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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

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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NetScaler

Compared 12% 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

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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 23% of the time

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 17% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 16% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 9% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

NetScaler

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

March 2025

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Citrix ADC, Citrix NetScaler VPX, NetScaler Console, NetScaler Web Application Firewall

NGINX WAF, NGINX 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

NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
Complying with security and regulatory requirements

NGINX App Protect offers:

Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security

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

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Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler

March 2025

Free Report: NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler

Find out what your peers are saying about NGINX App Protect vs. NetScaler and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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