We performed a comparison between Hillstone E-Series 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."UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"I really like the captive portal feature for our guest network. It has nice VLAN features in terms of separating our network. The anti-virus is also good."
"The SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"Our project needs to link two sides through the internet. One of these was in Cairo and the other in another city. We used FortiGate as the integrating solution between the two locations, i.e. the Fortinet 30E & 100E."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"The solution is stable."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"Five out of five ROI."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It only took a few hours to deploy."
"Working with the Hillstone E-Series has, from a remote perspective, allowed me to give my clients a secure connectivity."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The installation is easy, we have not had any complaints from our customers."
"The most valuable features of the Hillstone E-Series are its hardware capacity, innovation, and the throughput that the hardware can take."
"This solution has two main features that we find very valuable; a threat-intelligence option, and a web/application filtering option. The technical support team are very good and very quick."
"I am impressed with the application filtering feature."
"I'm the expert when it comes to Linux systems, however, with the pfSense, due to the web interface, the rest of the staff can actually make changes to it as required without me worrying about whether they've opened up ports incorrectly or not. The ease of use for non-expert staff is very good."
"Its reliability and cost-effectiveness stand out."
"Stability has been excellent. We have experienced no issues; it never fails."
"The initial setup was straightforward, therefore I wanted to continue using the product."
"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 documentation is very good."
"The classic features such as content inspection, content protection, and the application-level firewall, are the most important."
"Stability and technical support are the two major issues I have found with Fortinet."
"It should have a better pricing plan. It is too expensive. It should also have a more granular view of the attack. I don't have FortiAnalyzer, and it is difficult for me to have a complete view when there is an attack on my server."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"I am not sure if this solution offers active directory integration. Adding that feature will definitely be an advantage."
"The tool provides just a general report. It does not provide a granular report. Hence, the tool should work on its reporting feature."
"The current usage reporting is very basic."
"The solution doesn't have a web proxy built into the system like Sophos. This is something they should work to change."
"The tool needs to improve its price."
"Having frequent live webinars on a monthly basis would really help."
"SSL VPN license cost is not cheap."
"Support from Hillstone E-Series has a shortcoming that needs improvement."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"Network monitoring and device inventory could use some improvements. I'm using SpiceWorks for this because it never really worked in pfSense."
"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"The user interface can be improved to make it easier to add more features. And pfSense could be better integrated with other solutions, like antivirus."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
Hillstone E-Series is ranked 33rd in Firewalls with 9 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Hillstone E-Series is rated 9.0, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Hillstone E-Series writes "A user-friendly and marketable solution with a virtual switching capability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Hillstone E-Series is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, OpenVPN Access Server, Sangfor SSL VPN and Meraki MX, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Hillstone E-Series vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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