We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Smoothwall Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support."
"Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features are ease of use, flexibility, and most of the configuration we can be done using the GUI. When we compare Fortinet FortiGate with other solutions the firewall policy are very easy to understand."
"The payment function for applications is good."
"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."
"The dashboard I have found the most valuable in Fortinet FortiGate."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"The solution is very easy to use and configure."
"The initial setup was straightforward, therefore I wanted to continue using the product."
"I can manage it easily by myself."
"A free firewall that is a good network security appliance."
"The interface is straightforward and easy to use."
"It's a good solution for end-users. It's pretty easy to work with."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"The GUI is easy to understand."
"It was easy to initially deploy it."
"It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices."
"Maybe they could make some features more accessible, such as a way to translate directions between two networks that share the same subnets."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"Its price could be better."
"The support costs and licensing are sometimes so expensive."
"The sniffing packets or packet captures, can be simplified and improved because it's a little confusing."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"The UTM filtering needs improvement."
"Network monitoring and device inventory could use some improvements. I'm using SpiceWorks for this because it never really worked in pfSense."
"The product could offer more integrated plugins."
"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."
"Ease of use is a problem for a user who is unfamiliar with this product because, in the interface, everything has to be set manually."
"If a user doesn't have a large amount of experience in Linux systems, they will have problems using this solution. Users need to be highly skilled in troubleshooting competency. Users who do not have such skills will find the product difficult to use."
"The interface is not very shiny and attractive."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"Other solutions provide more scope for growth. For instance, we can have only 10 to 20 employees on VPN, but other solutions can support more users. We also have more capabilities to increase the performance of the solution."
"There is room for improvement in the UI. They can improve it by making it so that everything is in one place, so we don't have to jump around to different pages."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Smoothwall Firewall is ranked 34th in Firewalls with 1 review. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Smoothwall Firewall is rated 9.0. 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 Smoothwall Firewall writes "Offers good scalability and monitoring features ". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Smoothwall Firewall is most compared with OPNsense.
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