

Radware Alteon and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) are competitors in the application delivery controller market. Based on feature sets, F5 BIG-IP LTM may have an advantage in complex application environments due to its extensive capabilities, despite higher costs.
Features: Radware Alteon features include SSL-TLS acceleration, established user security, and reliable performance, which ensures 24/7 application availability. F5 BIG-IP LTM offers advanced load balancing, SSL offloading, and iRules for sophisticated traffic management, which are valuable for handling dynamic and complex scenarios.
Room for Improvement: Radware Alteon needs enhancements in automation, DNS integration, and live traffic monitoring. Users also report an outdated GUI and issues with responsiveness during complex deployments. F5 BIG-IP LTM faces pricing structure concerns, firmware quality control issues, and a quest for a more intuitive user interface. Both products require significant expertise for configuration and management.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Radware Alteon and F5 BIG-IP LTM offer deployment for on-premises and public cloud environments. Radware Alteon benefits from user-friendly deployment and solid technical support, though users occasionally face language and response time challenges. F5 BIG-IP LTM deployment is more complex but is supported by excellent customer service, albeit with slower resolution times on occasion.
Pricing and ROI: Radware Alteon is seen as cost-effective, offering a balanced price-feature proposition, making it suitable for cost-conscious organizations. Its reasonable pricing and flexible licensing contribute to a solid ROI. F5 BIG-IP LTM is recognized for higher costs, which users justify by the comprehensive security and functionality provided, offering value to large enterprises with complex needs.
The major return on investment is the security of our data.
Customer support is quite good but could be faster.
Overall, my experience with F5 is very good compared to Radware.
I would rate the technical support of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) nine out of ten.
We never face support issues, and their team resolves any critical issues quickly once they are involved.
There is a dedicated expert answering even the toughest questions.
The customer service and support are excellent.
It handles peak loads and thousands of concurrent connections without exceeding 10% utilization.
We have it deployed across multiple geographic locations, benefiting from load balancing resiliency.
Within a couple of hours, if the deployment is very straightforward and if the requirements or the IP addresses are already in place, the deployment can be completed.
We've never faced downtime, even during peak transaction hours.
There is minimal downtime, and the solution is quite stable.
There are no difficulties with the deployment of Radware Alteon; it is quite straightforward.
I expect faster resolutions when providing contact numbers while raising cases, as other companies typically do.
The pricing of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is on the higher side compared to competitors, but it is worth it.
In the future, I would like to see some other security features added, such as DDoS, which is Distributed Denial of Service.
Other OEMs offer free courses and hands-on labs on new technologies and features, which we find useful.
They keep integrating new features that sometimes break our production, but we use clustered systems, so we can test those software releases.
The product is costly.
For our solution, it was right in the middle of price performance.
The implementation and running costs are quite high.
The cost of the Radware solution is reasonable and stable.
The impact of SSL offloading on reducing server load and latency is very much positive because whatever traffic we receive, we encrypt at our F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) level, which has definitely reduced the additional load and SSL decryption load on the servers, so it has very much helped us and it is very smooth; it will not take much time and will not impact our regular traffic.
R-series has better CPU and memory, leading to higher throughput with minimal downtime, making it a significant improvement over the I-series.
One of the most beneficial features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is its ability to identify compromised traffic and its capabilities in authentication.
The product allows us to manage multiple networks and VLANs into a single box and add numerous web services and farms efficiently.
The best feature of Radware Alteon is basically the configuration; how we configure it is very straightforward, and it is very simple to configure.
The most valuable features include the availability with an optional high-availability mode ensuring service continuity because of the resiliency.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) | 11.6% |
| Radware Alteon | 4.9% |
| Other | 83.5% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 62 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 32 |
| Large Enterprise | 86 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 17 |
| Large Enterprise | 22 |
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) specializes in load balancing, iRules, and application security. It provides flexibility and stability, supporting SSL offloading and enhancing application performance and reliability with low downtime.
F5 BIG-IP LTM is designed for efficient traffic management and security. Its intuitive interface allows users to customize traffic through iRules and ensures stable application delivery. Its performance stability and ability to inspect TLS traffic, along with web application firewall features, make it preferred for consistent application delivery. While praised for its capabilities, users note its challenges with complex configuration and management. Calls for streamlined processes, training, support, better logging, and cloud integration highlight areas for improvement.
What are the key features of F5 BIG-IP LTM?F5 BIG-IP LTM is widely used in industries requiring robust application delivery and security, such as finance and healthcare. It supports load balancing and traffic management across different environments and acts as a reverse proxy, helping companies secure their infrastructure against cyber threats while facilitating high availability and scalability.
Alteon is Radware’s application delivery and security platform for delivering and protecting applications across physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments. Available as hardware, virtual appliances cloud deployment, Alteon provides local, global server and link load balancing, advanced traffic management, SSL/TLS offload and acceleration, automation, and application optimization, including HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support.
Through Alteon Protect, organizations can combine Alteon application delivery and on-device security with Radware Cloud Application Protection services, including web application and API protection, bot management, and web DDoS protection. This provides a unified application delivery and security approach across data center and cloud environments.
Alteon supports flexible capacity and deployment through Global Elastic Licensing (GEL), which enables licensed capacity to be allocated and reallocated across supported Alteon deployments as application and infrastructure requirements change.
The platform also supports modern automation and AI-assisted operations. Alteon MCP Server enables application, DevOps, and platform teams to use natural-language intent through an MCP-compatible AI client to create supported Alteon configurations using a guided workflow that gathers required parameters, validates configuration state, and maintains human review and approval before changes are applied. Alteon also supports lifecycle automation and integration through REST APIs, Ansible, Terraform, and Kubernetes/cloud-native environments.
Together, these capabilities enable organizations to deliver, scale, automate, and protect applications consistently across data centers, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid environments.
Alteon supports flexible perpetual and subscription-based licensing models. Physical appliance pricing is based on the selected Alteon hardware platform and enabled performance/capacity, while virtual and cloud deployments can be licensed according to the required capacity as a subscription. Global Elastic Licensing (GEL) provides additional flexibility by allowing licensed capacity to be allocated and redistributed across supported Alteon physical, virtual, and cloud deployments rather than tying all capacity permanently to an individual instance.
Customers can also purchase application delivery together with cloud-delivered application protection through Alteon Protect, providing a combined subscription model for Alteon application delivery and Radware Cloud Application Protection capabilities.
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