We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall 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 comes out on top in this comparison. It is high performing and, according to reviews, it is a more comprehensive solution than Azure Firewall. pfSense also received higher marks in the support category.
"The IPS is good. It protect my network from attackers."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the rules and quality of service."
"The ability to set up remote systems is the most valuable feature."
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"Good load balancing feature."
"The next-generation firewall is great."
"The most valuable features are that it is very simple to configure and to manage."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"Microsoft's technical support is very good. They're quite knowledgable and responsive."
"It's auto-scalable, which is a great feature."
"I like its order management feature. It doesn't have the kind of threat intelligence that Palo Alto has, but the order management makes it much simpler to know the difference."
"We secure the entry point to the virtual data center with the firewall."
"The Layer four features are okay and meet my business needs."
"I can easily configure it."
"The ability to create a VPN allows me to monitor branch offices from a central location."
"I use pfSense because it gives me the flexibility to greatly expand basic firewall features."
"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."
"The redundancy and scalability ARE very nice."
"The solution is very robust."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"The firewall sensor is highly effective, and it's easy to deploy. You can deploy pfSense with limited hardware resources. It's not necessary to have an appliance with much RAM to make it work. It's cost-effective and performs well."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a firewall solution and once it's deployed, you can rest assured that your system is secure."
"There is a lot of improvement needed with SSL-VPN."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"It's a little heavy compared to a FortiGate or other firewalls."
"The product could be made more customizable."
"Azure Firewall definitely needs a broader feature base. It should be able to go all the way up to layer 7 when looking at applications and things like that."
"It needs a lot of improvement, especially on intruder detection. They are working hard on that."
"The solution doesn't offer the same capabilities of Fortinet. It should offer intrusion prevention and advance filtering. These are two very useful features offered on Fortinet that Azure lacks."
"The development area and QA area could be improved. With those improvements, we can improve projects and take even less time to implement them."
"This solution is not mature when it comes to handling perimeter traffic like internet browsing."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"Also, simplifying the rules for the GeoIP. Making it simpler to understand would be an improvement."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"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."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"Could be simplified for new users."
"The solution could be more user-friendly, and the graphical interface needs some work so that someone without an IT background can use the application. I would like the ability to manage the on-premise appliance from the cloud. When I'm not in the office, it would be great to connect to the pfSense server and administer the network remotely."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Azure Front Door, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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