I saw this recent white paper on the IDG website on why Citrix’s Netscaler ADC beats F5. It’s an interesting read that created a handful of inquiries from end-user buyers, channel partners and investors, but I don’t think it accurately portrays buying criteria. So, after spending hours on the phone, I thought I would summarize the results in this blog.

Citrix did make a few good points on the pay-as-you-grow functionality to scale on demand, but that’s really just an economic argument. The feature parity between hardware and virtual ADCs is a strong differentiator for Citrix Netscaler as well, although, I still believe nothing scales like hardware and the use cases of the software-base ADCs right now are limited to developers and mid market. As they start to work their way into cloud deployments I think that will become a bigger competitive differentiator for Citrix if F5 doesn’t adjust accordingly.