We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Zscaler Internet Access based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"This solution has helped our organization by having strong functions and a reliable firewall."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"It is easy to manage, and it doesn't need much knowledge from the team. It is a stable device, and there are many features that are included out of the box."
"The Fortinet FortiGate local partners were good. I did not have direct contact with Fortinet support."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"It works. I put pfSense in, and it works. I can't think of any trouble I ever had with it. It runs on heat-sensitive appliances. They don't need a fan, so they don't overheat. It is affordable, fast, and very high-speed. It is built on BSD Unix, and it pretty much runs on any Intel processor."
"The initial setup was simple and fast."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"My company mainly works in the health and educational domain, schools and universities. I prevent the improper use of content from schools and universities. I defend the medical records for the patients in our hospitals. That is the main use case for me for the firewall."
"The most valuable features of pfSense are the reports, monitoring, filtration, and blocking incoming and outgoing traffic."
"The classic features such as content inspection, content protection, and the application-level firewall, are the most important."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"I handle the scanning for the finance department. I recently encountered an issue with the PCL bills, our company bills. I resolved the matter, cleared the bill, and received calls regarding it using pfsense.The user interface is extremely user-friendly, which is why we use it across various plant sites. Our IT representatives at the plants find it easy to use and manage because of its straightforward interface."
"The policies are very intuitive and easy to configure, with very little possibility of messing things up."
"We don't have to buy equipment to use it. And when our engineers set it up on our side, we just configured a few settings and we were in."
"Zscaler Internet Access's best feature is the granular policy controls."
"The solution’s customer service is good."
"There is no lag in service when accessing the internet."
"Overall, we're very happy with our product."
"Zscaler Internet Access's roaming user feature is most valuable and is much better compared to other secure web gateways."
"The security is excellent."
"Monitoring and reporting could be better."
"The solution could have licensing fees reduced in the future."
"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."
"Application management can be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"We have an issue with hotel guest vouchers."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"It's just not listed as FIPS compliant for where we're at now in government, which is an issue."
"In terms of areas of improvement, the interface seemed like it had a lot. The GUI interface that I had gotten into was rather elaborate. I don't know if they could zero in on some markets and potentially for small, medium businesses specifically, give them a stripped-down version of the GUI for pfSense."
"My only observation is about the quality of the IPSec logs, which are difficult to interpret and are poor in filters."
"Web interface could be enhanced and more user friendly."
"The access control aspect of the product could be improved."
"The router monitoring needs improvement when compared with Sonicwall."
"If you want to take advantage of all of the solution's options, you need to have a bit of a technical background. It's not for a layperson."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"There are a few features that are not compatible with the Azure cloud."
"Zscaler should provide adjacent services, which would be complementary to their current offering that could to be more pragmatic for a customer. For example, if you take Akamai, you get multiple sets of services, all depending on the customer and the strategy and the complexity and the problems. In some areas, they are more varied in terms of coverage."
"The interface for administration could be better. They should upgrade the management portal."
"One thing that they could improve is the ability to import rules from other platforms."
"The reporting functionality could be a bit easier to use. There is a reporting function, but it's quite hard to do any good reporting, from a user-management perspective. For example, if a department manager wants to know how his department is using the web, there is a way to get the data, but it's quite cumbersome to get it and show it well. And that's true for comparing between departments."
"Zscaler Internet Access could improve by adding a VPN feature."
"The OS capabilities and WSL support could be improved."
"An improvement would be if they could provide an out-of-the-box experience, like 20 to 30 features all ready to go. In comparison, LogRhythm offers out-of-the-box features. With Zscaler Internet Access, there is firewall IPS, multiple security services, filtering, DLP, and CASB browser isolation. These are things that all users are going to be using. However, when an administrator or architect would start building this, I would definitely need to engage professional services to help clients do it."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. 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 Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Appgate SDP. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
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