We performed a comparison between OPNsense and Smoothwall Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"Fortinet FortiGate's reliability is valuable."
"The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"Fortinet FortiGate protects against internet-based threats, both internal and external. It is scalable, stable, easy to use, and easy to install."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"I feel that its valuable features are that it is simple and free."
"It's more secure and more reliable."
"OPNsense is easy to use and open source."
"The VPN server feature is the most valuable. It is integrated with Radius and AAA for doing accounting and authentication. Insight view is also an important feature for me at this time. It allows me to assess our network traffic. I also like the firewall feature. The BSD kernel has a packet filter. It is one of the most solid frameworks for firewalls. Its user interface is one of the best interfaces I have used."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to configure."
"The interface and the dashboard are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The graphic user interface is very good and it is user-friendly which makes the product easy-to-use."
"It has firewall and VPN capabilities, which are very valuable features."
"It was easy to initially deploy it."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"Reporting is limited to providing an external appliance for improving the reporting capabilities of the FortiAnalyzer. It does not offer a central management and is also sold separably as an appliance."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"Its customer service could be better."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having a frequent ask questions(FAQ) area for people to receive quick answers to popular questions. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have an SMS notification feature. For example, if you cannot access your email you could receive an SMS message."
"They can do more tests before they release new versions because I would like to be more assured. We had some experiences where they release something new and great, but some of the old features are disabled or they don't work well, which impacts the product satisfaction. The manufacturer should be able to prove that everything works or not only that it might work. This is applicable to most of the other services, software, and hardware companies. They all should work on this. We cannot trust every new release, such as a beta release, on the first day. We wait for some comments on the forums and from other companies that we know. We always wait a few weeks before we use the updated version. They should also extend the VPN client application, especially for Linux versions. Currently, it has an application for Linux devices, but it doesn't work the way we want to connect to the VPN. They use only the old connection, not the new one. They have VPN client applications for Windows and Mac, but they can add more useful features to better manage the devices and monitor the current health of each device. Such features would be helpful for our company."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"The logging could improve in OPNsense."
"You will need additional training before you can actually start to use it."
"I would like better documentation concerning the provided packages and their integration."
"The user interface could be improved, and the DNS section should be more intuitive."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"On the customer-side, because I'm a small business, I need a cheaper or free solution option."
"The interface isn't so friendly user. But we have some technicians here who are quite confident with this tool. OPNSense could maybe add sets of rules so it's simpler to manage different groups with particular needs."
"We did not like the fact that you have to configure everything with the graphic user interface. We have used other firewalls, such as FortiGate, that you can configure via code. OPNsense is not easy to integrate. When you are deploying via GitHub or another source repository, this is not possible. That's one thing we didn't like much."
"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."
OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews while Smoothwall Firewall is ranked 34th in Firewalls with 1 review. OPNsense is rated 8.4, while Smoothwall Firewall is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Smoothwall Firewall writes "Offers good scalability and monitoring features ". OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and IPFire, whereas Smoothwall Firewall is most compared with Netgate pfSense.
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