We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Palo Alto Networks WildFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."All of the features of Fortinet FortiGate are useful and the security protection is good."
"It performs very well."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"The simplicity of the configuration and the stability of the product are most valuable. The VPN concentrator is very useful."
"I'm pretty happy with its reliability. It is also very scalable."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"It can expand easily."
"I only deal with it from a security analyst's point of view. I don't really get into the features of the actual FortiGate. From the security point of view, it works, and it does its job."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"I use pfSense because it gives me the flexibility to greatly expand basic firewall features."
"The initial setup is not complex."
"I have found pfSense to be stable."
"It is effective. We have not had any problems."
"The performance and functionality are good."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and the capture photo."
"The intrusion detection feature is the most valuable. It is an open-source firewall, so there is a lot of material on it. I also find the open VPN capability very nice. It is pretty customizable. The clustering and the high availability are the two biggest things to be able to get out of a firewall."
"Intuitive threat prevention and analysis solution, with a machine learning feature. Scalable, stable, and protects against zero-day threats."
"It gives a more accurate assessment of a virus in terms of whether it's truly a virus, malware, or a false positive. We have some legacy software that could pop up as being something that is malware. WildFire goes through and inspects it, and then it comes back and lets us know if it's a false positive. Usually, when it finds out that it's not a virus, it lets us know that it's benign, and it can exclude it from that scan, which means I don't even have to worry about that one popping up anymore."
"Their technical support is outstanding and top-notch."
"The most valuable feature for us is the VPN."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"Installing this product as a datacenter firewall for segregation and segmentation, and also configuring policies between zones has improved my organization."
"WildFire's application encryption is useful."
"High availability with active-active and active-passive modes."
"The initial setup is complex."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"The solution's framework needs to be frequently updated in order to have a stable solution."
"FortiGate is really good. We have been using it for quite some time. Initially, when we started off, we had around 70 plus devices of FortiGate, but then Check Point and Palo Alto took over the place. From the product perspective, there are no issues, but from the account perspective, we have had issues. Fortinet's presence in our company is very less. I don't see any Fortinet account managers talking to us, and that presence has diluted in the last two and a half or three years. We have close to 1,500 firewalls. Out of these, 60% of firewalls are from Palo Alto, and a few firewalls are from Check Point. FortiGate firewalls are very less now. It is not because of the product; it is because of the relationship. I don't think they had a good relationship with us, and there was some kind of disconnect for a very long time. The relationship between their accounts team and my leadership team seems to be the reason for phasing out FortiGate."
"In the next release, maybe the documentation on how to use this solution could be improved."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"Fortinet FortiGate is not very easy to use. The navigation could be improved to make it easier to use."
"The room for improvement is about the global delivery time period. Usually I need to wait for almost one month to deliver it overseas. So if you can shorten the deliver time it'd be great."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"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."
"Reporting and real-time monitoring, since I'm used to Watchguard's reporting features, it would be nice to have an embedded solution for reporting."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"They could improve their commercial stance and be more agile when it comes to the commercial pricing of enterprise deals."
"A malware blocker should be included. I do not know if it is included yet. However, until now, we have not experienced a large malware invasion."
"We are at the moment looking to use it as a proxy service so that we can limit what websites people go and view and that sort of thing. That's an area I've struggled with a little bit at the moment and it could be a bit easier to set up."
"The integration could be improved."
"The cost of the solution is excessively high."
"High availability features are lacking."
"The only complaint that we receive from our customers is in regards to the price."
"Any enhancements should likely be focused on the firewall appliance to further strengthen overall security capabilities, such as refining app and user identity features."
"They can keep on doing more updates. As new malware and viruses are coming out, they can make sure that WildFire is up to date."
"The configuration should be made a little bit easier. I understand why it is as it is, but there should be a way to make it easier from the user side."
"The free version does not have real-time updates. It is slow."
"The global product feature needs improvement, the VPN, and we need some enhanced features."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox and Arbor DDoS.
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