We performed a comparison between Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] and Netgate pfSense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"The virtual firewall feature is the most valuable. We have around 1,500 firewalls. We did not buy individual hardware, and the virtual firewalls made sense because we don't have to keep on buying the hardware. FortiGate is easier to use as compared to Checkpoint devices. It is user friendly and has a good UI. You don't need much expertise to work on this firewall. You don't need to worry much about DCLA, commands, and things like that."
"I like Fortinet FortiGate's antispam filter, SPN, and clustering features."
"Consolidated our network environment at all locations, but mainly at our datacenter."
"The most outstanding feature is being able to centralize each of the functions in a single device."
"The UTM platform has been the most valuable."
"The filtering was very good."
"Firewalls help us a lot in controlling traffic on our network and preventing unauthorized access."
"We can create a domain to separate and segregate some functions, some services."
"It safeguards against cyber attacks."
"The most valuable feature for us was to implement negligent functionality, to direct functionality to viewer control and application control so we could disconnect, and at the same time, we installed checkpoints. We disconnected our proxy."
"The databases and its signatures are its most important features."
"It is a better firewall than others and it has better features."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"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 solution is very easy to use and configure."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"I'm the expert when it comes to Linux systems, however, with the pfSense, due to the web interface, the rest of the staff can actually make changes to it as required without me worrying about whether they've opened up ports incorrectly or not. The ease of use for non-expert staff is very good."
"I especially like the VPN part. It works like a charm."
"The performance and speed are aspects of the solution that could always be improved upon."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"Difficult to add or define, and not that easy to configure and manage."
"They are doing good, but they can improve the distributor assignment. The availability of the product and the timeline of delivery are the main things. The distribution should be swift, and the distributor should not reach out to end customers directly. They should work as a distributor. There should also be one more local distributor. Currently, there is only one distributor in Pakistan, and the rest of them are in UAE. It is difficult to work with only one distributor. Sometimes, you don't get along with the same distributor, and that's why they should have one more distributor. Their licensing should also be improved. The activation or renewal of the product should be done from the date of renewal, not from the date on which the license expired."
"The reports are very basic."
"The solution could be improved if there was a better way to report. The reporting functionality is not really good. Even though it's not the major function. Maybe adding a way to make a custom report."
"I am not able to see a demo."
"The solution should be more user-friendly."
"Technical support was very bad because the supplier who sold it to us, wasn't very supportive, and he wouldn't giving us direct links to the OEM."
"While the technical support is good, the Indian level technical support could use an upgrade."
"Specifically on the user experience, sometimes the set up of things, such as the VPN SSL, takes a lot of time to load and a lot of time to get up and running on every session."
"Some features that could be improved are advanced threat protection, sandboxing, and vulnerability management."
"The interface needs improvement."
"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."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
"Many people have problems setting up the web cache for the web system."
"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."
"The solution could use better reporting. They need to offer more of it in general. Right now, the graphics aren't the best. If you need to provide a report to a manager, for example, it doesn't look great. They need to make it easier to understand and give users the ability to customize them."
"If a user doesn't have a large amount of experience in Linux systems, they will have problems using this solution. Users need to be highly skilled in troubleshooting competency. Users who do not have such skills will find the product difficult to use."
"pfSense is not user-friendly. I hope to have something to make the interfaces more user-friendly."
"I would like to see different graphs available in the reporting."
Earn 20 points
Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Firewalls with 19 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] is rated 8.2, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] writes "Great firewalls, VPN, and Intrusion prevention capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] is most compared with , whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall.
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