F5 NGINX Plus
Load balancing software
Web server accelerator software
Web accelerator software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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What is F5 NGINX Plus
F5 NGINX Plus is a commercial distribution of NGINX used for reverse proxying, load balancing, and accelerating delivery of web and API traffic. It is commonly deployed by infrastructure and platform teams to front application servers, microservices, and Kubernetes workloads. Compared with the open source edition, it adds vendor-supported features such as advanced health checks, active monitoring/metrics, and additional traffic-management capabilities. It runs as software on Linux and is often used in cloud and on-prem environments.
Mature L7 reverse proxy
NGINX Plus supports high-performance HTTP(S) reverse proxy and Layer 7 load balancing patterns used for web and API front ends. It provides flexible routing and header/cookie-based behaviors that fit common application delivery requirements. Teams can use it as a general-purpose traffic entry point for multiple services without requiring specialized hardware.
Commercial support and updates
NGINX Plus includes vendor-backed support and a commercial release process, which many enterprises require for production SLAs. It provides packaged builds and security/maintenance updates aligned to a supported lifecycle. This can reduce operational risk compared with relying solely on community support for the open source edition.
Operational visibility features
NGINX Plus includes built-in monitoring endpoints and status/metrics that help operators observe upstream health and traffic behavior. It supports more advanced health checking than the open source edition, which can improve failover decisions for application pools. These capabilities help with troubleshooting and capacity planning in environments where external observability is limited or standardized.
License cost and procurement
NGINX Plus is a paid product, which introduces subscription cost and procurement overhead compared with open source alternatives. Budgeting can be a constraint for smaller teams or for large-scale edge deployments with many instances. Organizations may need to justify the commercial features versus using the open source edition plus third-party tooling.
Configuration complexity at scale
Advanced routing, TLS, and upstream policies can lead to complex configuration management as deployments grow. Teams often need strong automation (templates, CI/CD, configuration validation) to avoid drift and reduce change risk. Without disciplined practices, troubleshooting and change control can become time-consuming.
Not a full CDN platform
NGINX Plus focuses on application delivery and load balancing rather than providing a globally distributed CDN with built-in edge POPs. Organizations that need worldwide caching, edge compute, or DDoS services typically require additional infrastructure or services. This can increase architectural complexity for internet-scale delivery use cases.
Plan & Pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Annual enterprise subscription | Contact F5 for pricing | NGINX Plus is sold as part of an annual enterprise subscription/packaging (NGINX One). Includes NGINX Plus (commercial binary with enterprise features). Trial: free 30-day trial available. For cloud: NGINX as a Service for Azure is offered as a pay-as-you-go model (per NGINX Consumption Unit per hour). Contact F5 for reseller/volume pricing and support-tier options. |
Seller details
F5, Inc.
Seattle, Washington, USA
1996
Public
https://www.f5.com/
https://x.com/f5
https://www.linkedin.com/company/f5/
