We performed a comparison between Kerio Control and pfSense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: pfSense has the winning edge in this comparison because it received higher marks in the features, pricing, and service and support categories.
"Good load balancing feature."
"The simplicity of the product is great. It's very easy to use, which is a compliment we get all the time in terms of feedback."
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"The security features are about the best that I've seen anywhere."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"The performance is good."
"I like intrusion detection and prevention and bandwidth management. The routing part is also awesome. It is a good firewall. We never had a major breach from outside. We've never been impacted by ransomware, and our systems have never been infiltrated."
"All of the features of Kerio Control are equally good. Most valuable to us are the firewall rules, the intrusion detection system, and IP address features."
"The top features are ones that we're not using yet but we soon will be because we've just had broadband upgraded in Australia. We've got something called the National Broadband Network, which is forced onto you, so you have to take it when it arrives. We'll be trying the high availability out soon. We tried that with some load balancing, it didn't quite work as we expected, but I think that was more of a configuration thing rather than a product thing."
"I have found the most valuable features of Kerio Control to be the IPS and firewall."
"The user interface and the ease of use are pretty good. Everything fits together so nicely."
"The firewall and the content filtering options are valuable."
"Its support is very good, and it is stable product."
"The installation is straightforward."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"Firewall system for small, medium, and large data networks. It allows you to provide security to your environment: DMZ networks, LAN, WAN, etc."
"I like the connectivity to the open VPN. It's very smooth."
"A valuable feature is that the solution is open source."
"There is good documentation with a fantastic community and enterprise support."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"The redundancy and scalability ARE very nice."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"WAN load-balancing could be a lot better at detecting when a link is poor or inconsistent, and not just flat out dead."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"The web-cache feature which was previously on the FortiGate device, but was deleted with the recent upgrade should be returned. It was a very valuable feature for us."
"Backup can be improved."
"Fortigate's hardware capacities could be improved."
"One area that confused me a bit when I was building my current network. I use VLANs to have separate functionality on the network, and the appliance I got was the WiFi model, but I discovered that you can't assign WiFi channels to the VLAN. So, you can have WiFi, but its own subnet. You can't run that over the VLAN. Effectively, I can't use the WiFi facility in the appliance and had to purchase a separate web that supports VLANs. In the end, I had to go to GFI support. They confirmed this is just a limited functionality of that device, as it is a low-end device. I don't know if any of their high-end models have a better facility or not."
"The trial duration of the product should be extended."
"I would like to be able to automatically send email from Kerio Control and have it tell me what my external IPs are, because on one of my lines I have a fixed IP address and on the other it is variable. If there were a permanent way for me to figure out, "Okay, my current external VPN and my firm IP is this," it would help. I need to know the IP address to connect with the VPN and, at the moment, one of the lines sometimes changes its IP address without me knowing it. It's a hassle to figure out what it is."
"One of the problems we do have causes problems with the VPN. The software slows the throughput down too much. You could have a one-gigabit connection from the internet, and it slows it down to the area of upload and download is extremely slow. There's too much content filtering at that point."
"I would like for there to be a difference between international and national links."
"It has a VPN back to our data center but I don't think it has increased the number of VPN clients extended to those outside our environment"
"The denial of service could also be improved. There recently was a big issue with denial of service attacks and it was a bit laborious."
"I would like to see them develop a bit more flexibility creating VLANs."
"I tried pfSense, and it has a big issue with file system consistency, and this is what drove me to OPNsense. The file system stability is quite a big issue for us. We have a lot of outages related to power issues, and OPNsense is much more stable on this side."
"The main problem with pfSense is that we have to use proxy solutions."
"In an upcoming release, the reporting could be more user-friendly. For example, the reporting in graphs and charts for the host can be cumbersome."
"This solution is good for small businesses but it is not as stable as other competitors such as Fortinet."
"The solution’s interface must be improved."
"The hotspot and the portal feature in this solution are not stable for WiFi access. We use it at least once or twice every day and it crashes. Some modules can be better by improving detection and having new updates. Additionally, we have some issues with clustering and load balancing that could improve."
"pfSense is not user-friendly. I hope to have something to make the interfaces more user-friendly."
"We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs."
KerioControl is ranked 29th in Firewalls with 54 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. KerioControl is rated 8.0, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of KerioControl writes "With VPN, any of our guys can log in to the system and effectively be on board; helps with our customers all over the world". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". KerioControl is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox. See our KerioControl vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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