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."I like Fortinet FortiGate's antispam filter, SPN, and clustering features."
"The usage in general is pretty good."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN, as it allows us to connect and it separates this product from other firewalls."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that it is good to use, and most importantly, the pricing. The customer especially likes the discount when they trade up or something like that."
"Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs. We have scaled already from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"The web filtering facility and application control are the most valuable features from the point of view of our clients. The VPN feature is also quite popular amongst our clients. Two-factor authentication is one of the good features in Fortinet. These features are important for the current scenario of security. Security has become a necessity nowadays. With cyber-attacks becoming more common, protecting an organization's data is one of the major tasks. It is also very stable and scalable, and it is very straightforward to configure. Their technical support is also good."
"The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."
"I like the connectivity to the open VPN. It's very smooth."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"Content protection, content inspection, and the application level firewall."
"I like pfSense's reports and how I can control access to the policies on the firewall."
"The flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"It is easy to use and has integrity with other systems, such as proxies and quality of service."
"At our peak time, we have reached more than 5,000 concurrent connections."
"It is a better firewall than others and it has better features."
"It was easy to initially deploy it."
"The solution is very expensive."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
"The UTM filtering needs improvement."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"From a reporting perspective, there's room for improvement. They're providing FortiAnalyzer through which one can get some enhancements, but the visibility and reporting still need slight improvement."
"The pricing could always be better."
"I would like Fortinet to add more automation to FortiGate."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"There are several levels of firewall configuration such as beginner, advanced, and expert configurations. At each level, it becomes more complex and more tricky to set up the firewall. For example, if you want to install the firewall on your computer system, it would be a lot easier if it just tells you that this is the internet NIC and this is the Wi-Fi NIC."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
"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."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"User interface is a little clumsy."
"The stability could be improved."
"Could be simplified for new users."
"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.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.