We performed a comparison between Juniper vSRX 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."Secure, user-friendly, stable, and scalable network security solution. Installation is straightforward."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"FortiGate's web and URL filtering are unlike any other firewall I've used. The functionality of URL filtering in those solutions is problematic because everything is encrypted, and firewalls can't break that encryption protocol. Fortinet has an SSL proxy, so the encryption is done before the packet ever leaves the FortiGate. The URL filter is definitely one of the most helpful features."
"Offers good security and filtering."
"It's a firewall that secures our internal network. I have been using it since 2013, and I find that most of the features are advanced, and very user friendly."
"The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."
"Fortinet FortiGate is scalable for our users. Right now, we have almost 70 users. We do not have any plan to increase our usage of FortiGate. For maintaining the firewall solution, one staff member is enough."
"The features we found most valuable are using the IDS and IPS during protection. The application filtering feature is great."
"The solution has good features."
"Juniper is more flexible with the commit check and the commit confirmed command. The design of the forwarding and contract plan in the operating system is very important for the performance when we have very big traffic."
"The tool's most valuable features are routing features and service quality."
"The product's scalability is good, and my company has 150 users."
"The most valuable features are application filtering, content filtering, the intrusion prevention system (IPS), and definitely the application firewall."
"There are a few valuable features that offer very good quality on the solution. Especially NetScreen. We used to use NetScreen for the the product line. It was a very mature solution, very robust, easy to configure, easy to manage, etc. It made it easy to do everything."
"This solution works well. Their switches and firewall are good."
"Great extensibility of the platform."
"Creation of certificates and the facility to administer services are valuable features."
"It is a stable solution. It is also easy to install and can be deployed and maintained by one team member."
"The interface is straightforward and easy to use."
"The flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"It is a very good solution for enterprises that need a VPN for their employees. It is the best way to provide a remote work facility to employees at a very low cost. Other solutions that I have had in the past were very expensive. Enterprises don't always have that kind of money to invest."
"pfSense is a nice product, and I find that there's a lot of information out there. There are some good tutorials on YouTube and other websites with helpful information."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"I think there could be more QoS features"
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"Technical support needs to be improved."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for 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."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
"I have to say that the initial setup was complex. The deployment took a few days to get set up. Initially, we were using an IPVanish. We switched to this tool since we thought it would be easier. But it turns out it wasn't easier to set up and run."
"There are too many types of licenses, which can be confusing."
"The reporting can be improved."
"The solution should consider improving its licensing policies."
"The solution could improve its technical support."
"The GUI interface needs improvement."
"I would like to see an activity sensor for malicious content or sensor for viruses and malware."
"The solution can be improved by allowing automatic updates for the OS devices."
"I've talked to people that say Juniper now, as a device, can be a solution for a data center, but in the past, I have not seen this as being possible."
"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."
"It should integrate with LDAP, Active Directory, etc, to improve the way in which the traces and connections of each IP, or user connected through the firewall, are shown."
"It needs to be more secure."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
"In an upcoming release, the reporting could be more user-friendly. For example, the reporting in graphs and charts for the host can be cumbersome."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
"The solution’s interface must be improved."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
Juniper vSRX is ranked 24th in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Juniper vSRX is rated 7.8, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Juniper vSRX writes "Fast with good usability and fairly scalable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Juniper vSRX is most compared with Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Cisco Secure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Juniper vSRX vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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