Likelihood to Recommend For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.
Read full review Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.
Read full review Pros Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management. With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network. Read full review Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin. Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow. Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood. Read full review Cons Live examples in the Azure documentation Application Gateway UI Blade in Azure Portal can be streamlined Have more advanced feature set as WAF (Web Application Firewall) Hajira Khan Senior Project Manager | Technical Project Manager
Read full review The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful. Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security. Read full review Usability Improve on the specifics I mentioned previously and could be a 10/10 product. It is also a confusingly branded product that I have supported in two large enterprises where IT departments are unsure if the product belongs to the Citrix remote access support team or the Network infrastructure support team (it should be the later) and typically under utilized.
Read full review Support Rating I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.
Read full review Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and
Azure Traffic Manager ) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features.
Azure Firewall , although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.
Read full review We chose Citrix ADC over Kemp and F5 due to additional integrations with various products such as Citrix/Horizon/Monitoring tools. We additionally chose ADC due to better ease of use and ability to have the appliances be virtual or physical, with the configuration being a simple migration of code which provided flexibility to be able to do a hybrid environment with ease.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive : Improved performance and scalability Positive : Better and enhanced Security Positive : Efficiency Negative: Cost Negative: More resources to manage. Read full review It has saved a tremendous amount of money and manpower by allowing for broad support without the need for a VPN. The security functions within Netscaler enabled our business to pass additional IT-based audits. Having a full Citrix stack from front to back makes our business look more professional both to our users and outsiders. Read full review ScreenShots