We performed a comparison between Juniper SRX Series Firewall and OPNsense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Juniper SRX Series Firewall is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface, ease of use, and exceptional support. It boasts advantageous features such as site-to-site VPN functionality and a robust command line. OPNsense is appreciated for its scalability and remarkable features such as guest access capabilities and dashboards. Additionally, the availability of a free version is highly valued. OPNsense also offers features such as IDS and IPS, effortless configuration, and compatibility with pfSense.
Juniper SRX Series Firewall would benefit from enhancements in capacity limitations, reporting and alerts, user interface, device reliability, documentation, and feature enhancements. OPNsense needs improvements in the interface, bandwidth management, high availability, logging, integration, updates, IPS solution, hardware updates, installation, reporting, SSL inspection, and learning curve.
Service and Support: The customer service for Juniper SRX Series Firewall is highly regarded for its knowledgeable and supportive technical assistance. However, there have been occasional delays in response times. OPNsense's customer service has garnered both positive and negative feedback, with some users describing it as exceptional while others believe there is room for improvement.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Juniper SRX Series Firewall can be challenging and time-consuming, depending on the environment and integration needs. OPNsense provides a simple and quick setup that can be accomplished within a few hours, even by individuals without IT expertise.
Pricing: Juniper SRX Series Firewall has a relatively simple setup process, although configuring security settings may require additional time. OPNsense is a cost-effective open-source solution that does not necessitate licensing fees. However, there are associated expenses related to equipment, installation, resources, personnel, and training.
ROI: Juniper SRX Series Firewall provides reliability, consistent operation, and advanced security capabilities, leading to a favorable return on investment. OPNsense delivers a return on investment within a short timeframe of under three months and eliminates the need for ongoing payments.
Comparison Results: Juniper SRX Series Firewall is the preferred product in comparison to OPNsense. It offers a simple and fast setup process, a user-friendly interface, great support, and a wide range of useful features. Users appreciate its stability, scalability, and competitive pricing.
"The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH."
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"We are a visual effects company, and there have been a number of high profile security issues in our industry. This has brought us to a higher standard of security, which our clients are very keen on these days."
"We use a southern institution that's audited for IT security and the reporting that automatically comes off the unit makes it much easier to meet compliance standards and makes it easier as far as the amount of time that has to be spent to compile that information. If you get your reporting set up correctly when you initially set it up, you just select the one you want and hit print. The auditing trail on it is the best feature."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"We think they have a good interface, the operating system is good, it's robust. It has plenty of great features, and the relation between the cost and benefits works for our business."
"The IPS functionality of Juniper SRX is useful in the telecom industry."
"The GUI is simple to use."
"The setup is pretty straightforward."
"Most of our clients use it as a traditional firewall, blocking Layer 3 and Layer 4, blocking by transport."
"The virtualization feature is the most valuable feature. Sometimes customers are requesting a private connection using mobile data when they are connecting to remote sites."
"It is very fast and very easy to maintain. Another nice part of it is that you can easily extract the logs and move them over to a security operations center."
"Troubleshooting with the solution is quite easy. If you compare the process to, for example, Fortigate, Juniper is much easier."
"OPNsense is easy to scale when running on the hardware."
"The initial setup is easy. It only takes 15-30 minutes to deploy."
"The technical support is very good."
"The solution is good for a basic firewall for a small business or for home use."
"The VPN server feature is the most valuable. It is integrated with Radius and AAA for doing accounting and authentication. Insight view is also an important feature for me at this time. It allows me to assess our network traffic. I also like the firewall feature. The BSD kernel has a packet filter. It is one of the most solid frameworks for firewalls. Its user interface is one of the best interfaces I have used."
"OPNsense is highly stable."
"It has firewall and VPN capabilities, which are very valuable features."
"The most valuable features of OPNsense are the GUI and frequent updates."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"I think there could be more QoS features"
"Fortinet FortiGate is not very easy to use. The navigation could be improved to make it easier to use."
"They've become quite expensive."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"The user interface and the GUI need improvement."
"IPS is one that I would definitely want to be improved. I would also like SSL VPN to be integrated."
"It needs better interoperability with Cisco gear."
"It does have its nuances in terms of deployment. There are always areas to make something easier or more intuitive or make the system auto-negotiate more with existing hardware."
"The solution isn't very granular or detailed."
"Juniper SRX is stable, but it could improve. FortiGate has better stability than Juniper SRX."
"I think Juniper SRX should have a GUI. Some of the competitors are already implementing GUI for the firewall."
"Juniper SRX's UI is very bad."
"We did not like the fact that you have to configure everything with the graphic user interface. We have used other firewalls, such as FortiGate, that you can configure via code. OPNsense is not easy to integrate. When you are deploying via GitHub or another source repository, this is not possible. That's one thing we didn't like much."
"In terms of improvement, the performance could be enhanced."
"There are issues with stability and reliability."
"I think the most important thing is that it should be easily accessible, but currently, that doesn't seem to be the case. We need a hardware platform that's based on common standards and open computing principles, which would be like a commodity and benefit us greatly."
"I would like better documentation concerning the provided packages and their integration."
"They should improve IPEs for security in the future."
"The logging could improve in OPNsense."
"You will need additional training before you can actually start to use it."
Juniper SRX Series Firewall is ranked 18th in Firewalls with 86 reviews while OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews. Juniper SRX Series Firewall is rated 7.8, while OPNsense is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Juniper SRX Series Firewall writes "Highly scalable, user-friendly UI, and easy to maintain". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". Juniper SRX Series Firewall is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos UTM, whereas OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and IPFire. See our Juniper SRX Series Firewall vs. OPNsense report.
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