We performed a comparison between Cisco IOS Security and Netgate pfSense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."
"It is very flexible to use."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"The stability of this solution is excellent."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Cisco IOS Security is a mature product with extensive capabilities, serving as the base for the defense layer. It offers good network visibility, which helps in rapid response through the Rapid Threat Containment feature. Its deployment and configuration are straightforward."
"I'm able to transfer data over internet network security. With the GRE I'm able to transfer data within one bunch to another bunch in a public way, like the internet. The communication is encrypted and is private. It gives me added privacy."
"We use the product for firewalls."
"Cisco Technical Assistance Center works on a follow-the-sun concept and gives real 24x7 customer support, which is a great advantage when you have a service contract with them."
"You can scale it when you need to."
"I've found their network routing to be very good."
"The "OpenVPN Client Export" package is really helpful in exporting the VPN client software on most popular devices: iOS/Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and a handful of SIP handsets."
"The solution is very robust."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It is a stable solution."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"The scalability is very good, where you can do an HA configuration and then bring in another box, if necessary."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"The UTM filtering needs improvement."
"Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I don't get proper reports."
"In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"The captive portal could be improved."
"The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"The company needs to make its solution more affordable to make it more accessible to larger markets. Otherwise, it's seen as an enterprise-level solution that small or medium-sized organizations can't afford and therefore they won't even look at it."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"An area for improvement in Cisco IOS Security is the performance because it's not as stable sometimes. There's also some latency in the solution, which could be improved. Cisco IOS Security integrates with other solutions, but you'll encounter many errors after integration, so this is another area for improvement. I'd like to see enhanced performance and a simplified setup in the next version of Cisco IOS Security."
"Cisco IOS Security should improve its functionalities."
"There are the usual bugs that are inherent to some software upgrades. Sometimes this provides some unexpected issues, however, it happens with all brands all the time."
"It takes too much time to deploy a policy to FMC. It takes around eight minutes. You can't afford any downtime when you're changing policies."
"Cisco is an expensive firewall, so the pricing can be improved."
"If they could increase the performance a little better because the device sometimes gets slow."
"The product must provide integration with other solutions."
"Needs services on additional features, such as managing inventory and generating reports."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"It should integrate with LDAP, Active Directory, etc, to improve the way in which the traces and connections of each IP, or user connected through the firewall, are shown."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"The access control aspect of the product could be improved."
"Layer 7 advanced firewall features are not included in the solution."
"My only observation is about the quality of the IPSec logs, which are difficult to interpret and are poor in filters."
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 23rd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco IOS Security writes "User-friendly and excels in documentation, making it easier to resolve issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Fortinet FortiOS, Meraki MX, OPNsense and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Cisco IOS Security vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
