We performed a comparison between FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Netgate pfSense 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."Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use. Anyone can easily maintain it."
"It has very easy management and an amazing ETM configuration."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"SSL-VPN is very useful for us and has been very reliable."
"We can use our devices to check all of the perimeters. It secures email websites."
"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 pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"The IPS and the application control feature are the most valuable."
"The tool's most valuable feature is IPS. In my experience, I haven't encountered any issues with integration. It easily integrates with the FortiGate solution. However, verifying through documentation and assessing their support is necessary."
"FortiGate is a rapidly growing vendor with a wide range of ready-to-use products. Their delivery time is remarkably quick, usually between two to four weeks."
"The GUI configuration is its most valuable feature"
"The product is easy to configure."
"It is easy to install. There is not much complexity involved."
"The most valuable feature of FortiGate Next Generation Firewall is its SD-WAN."
"The product is user-friendly and not complex."
"I had some outages in the network and we provide services for our company. We sell mobile credits. The terminal gets access to our own server inside the network and if one internet fails, then the other one is still up and we have a back-up link on the devices."
"The gain in performance and security from configuring the VPN connections was significant."
"It has a good web cache. I used to use a DHCP server and DNS server. For my company, I use pfSense as a load balancing application."
"Good basic firewall features."
"We can run it on any hardware."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and the capture photo."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"There is one big configuration file with no separations for the unique VDOMs. Maybe they could separate individual VDOM configuration files with the root VDOM configuration file referencing the individual VDOM config files."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"The solution needs to integrate VPN features."
"I see room to explore its integration with Secure Service Automation for a more comprehensive security view."
"There should be better customization in the IPS."
"The inability to change passwords when using FortiGate firewall and relying on a local FortiGate database for account creation can be problematic, particularly in non-Active Directory setups."
"The solution needs to improve its support."
"The solution's GUI is not very appealing."
"Its technical support could be better."
"There's a limitation wherein you can only have about 30 virtual or secondary IPs on a particular interface."
"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."
"The Netgate forums and community don’t provide extensive discussions and topics related to every pfSense service."
"The solution requires a lot of administration."
"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."
"The usage reports can be better."
"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."
"The stability could be improved."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
More FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) Pricing and Cost Advice →
FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) is ranked 14th in Firewalls with 37 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) is rated 8.4, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) writes "Easy to set up but needs better pricing and more helpful support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) is most compared with OPNsense, Tailscale, Twingate, Fortinet FortiGate-VM and Google Cloud Platform Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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