Citrix ADC features software-driven architecture that delivers performance and scale without a heavy reliance on custom hardware, blades, or chassis systems.
As businesses embrace the cloud, hybrid has become their new reality, resulting in a complete end-to-end network infrastructure from the data center to the cloud. Investment in hardware across the data center are being reconsidered as applications migrate to the cloud.
Only Citrix ADC
- Provides flexibility to license ADC instances interchangeably between your on-premise data center and the cloud, across any form factor
- Offers application and infrastructure intelligence for applications deployed on premises or in the cloud, as a service
- Includes a complete end-to-end app delivery solution that encompasses server-side and WAN optimizations, in addition to securing access to SaaS environments
- Provides a comprehensive device package for Cisco ACI deployments
- Supports up to 115 virtual ADC instances on a single physical appliance
- Provides support for heterogeneous digital workspace solutions
Citrix ADC advantages over F5
| Feature | Citrix ADC |
F5 | The Citrix ADC advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managebility | |||
| Single management console for configuration, orchestration, and analytics |
Citrix ADC configuration management has unique capabilities:
|
||
| Advanced analytics |
Anomaly detection with proactive alerts based on server responsiveness, uneven load balancing, and DNS vulnerabilities with machine learning | ||
| Security analytics | Limited | Security-insights-based approach for threat and safety assessment, providing a visual representation of app vulnerabilities and attacks. Provides recommendations for configurations to increase security posture. | |
| Gateway analytics | Limited | Provides insights to help admins troubleshoot remote logon issues based on specific applications, users, and logons. | |
| Flexibility | |||
| Multiple for factors including containerized |
Citrix ADC leverages the same code base across hardware and software; including a native containerized service that runs in a Docker container. Includes support for Mesos/Marathon and Kubernetes. | ||
| Flexible licensing for shared capacity |
Limited | Citrix ADC offers a pooled-capacity licensing model that allows capacity to be shared across hardware- and software-based instances. F5 only allows iSeries licenses to be transferred to the cloud on their virtual edition, no shared concurrent capacity allowed. | |
| Support for vitual guest instances (multi-tenancy) on an appliance |
Limited | Citrix ADC provides differentiated multi-tenancy:
|
|
| Software based capacity upgrades (Pay-grow) |
Limited | Citrix ADC allows pay-grow for all appliance attributes. F5 only provides for SSL and HTTP increases, bandwidth is not upgradeable. | |
| Instance and appliance clustering |
Limited | A complete clustering solution at L2 and L3, includes traffic steering capabilities across a single data plane. | |
| Architecture | |||
| Software centric design | Citrix ADC leverages innovation and performance in software that can be deployed on commodity hardware or in the cloud. | ||
| Common code base across multiple form factors and deployment scenarios | Different versions across form factors, hardware centric bias | Citrix ADC leverages the same code base/API across every form factor to ensure the highest levels of feature parity | |
How Citrix outperforms F5
F5 displacement by Citrix networking solutions.