We performed a comparison between Check Point CloudGuard Network Security and pfSense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security provides valuable features like VPN Blade, IPS Blade, URL filtering, and Applications Control Blade. pfSense is appreciated for its capacity to block IP addresses, user-friendly dashboards, and open-source nature.
Check Point could enhance its support system, cluster creation on AWS, data protection visibility, DLP feature, user interface, integration with other security solutions, cost reduction, documentation, and on-prem deployment flexibility. pfSense could improve instructional videos, stability, mobile application, GUI usability, updates, threat handling, FIPs compliance, log analysis, VPN capacity, documentation, user-friendliness, configuration processes, and SD-WAN integration.
Service and Support: Some customers appreciate the technical support provided by Check Point, while others express dissatisfaction with response time and global support. pfSense's customer service garners both positive and negative reviews. Some users commend the technical support they receive, while others rely on community resources for assistance.
Ease of Deployment: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is praised for its easy, simple, and straightforward initial setup. Users find it interactive, user-friendly, and effortless to configure. However, it may require technical expertise and proper guidelines from customer support. pfSense is generally regarded as easy and straightforward to set up, with a simple installation process. The timeframe for completion varies from as little as 15 minutes to a few days, depending on the user's familiarity with firewall and network concepts.
Pricing: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is recognized for its high price, however, it provides strong security measures and good value. pfSense is an open-source option that offers reasonable pricing and no extra expenses. However, there is a lack of available information concerning the exact costs associated with pfSense's licensing.
ROI: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security provides improved performance and benefits for organizations, resulting in a higher ROI range of 80% to 85%. pfSense is highly regarded for its cost-effectiveness and affordability, enabling substantial savings.
Comparison Results: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is the preferred option when compared to pfSense. Users find the initial setup of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security to be straightforward, and user-friendly. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security offers more valuable features including VPN, IPS, URL filtering, and Applications Control Blade, which are highly appreciated for their compliance, intrusion protection, and productivity enhancement.
"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."
"Fortinet FortiGate appears to be scalable."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"The usage in general is pretty good."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"It's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"Customers appreciate the CME plugin for automatically understanding assets within the cloud. This information appears in the manager, allowing users to tag the assets and adjust policies and rules accordingly."
"It offers remarkable flexibility in how we configure and utilize the resources."
"The versatility is the solution's most valuable feature."
"This solution brings us closer to having a better security score, which helps us a lot in complying with information regulations based on security."
"CloudGuard's intelligent tools help us automate many manual security tasks, guaranteeing our customers' environments will be secure."
"Workflows across the company ecosystem have can flow smoothly without experiencing any challenges."
"The tool's most valuable features are firewalls and IPS."
"The product gives analytic reports."
"It is a stable solution. It is also easy to install and can be deployed and maintained by one team member."
"The built-in open VPN and the VPN Client Export are the solution's most valuable aspects."
"The solution has good customization abilities and plenty of features."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"The plugins or add-ons are most valuable. Sometimes, they are free of charge, and sometimes, you have to pay for them, but you can purchase or download very valuable plugins or add-ons to perform internal testing of your network and simulate a denial-of-service attack or whichever attack you want to simulate. You can also remote and monitor your network and see where the gap is. Did you forget a printer port? Most attacks at the moment are happening through printers, and they can tell you immediately that you forgot to close the port of the printer. There are more than one million printers that are in danger, and everybody knows that hackers are using them to enter the network. So, you can download plugins to protect your network."
"The most valuable feature, for instance, is the ease of migrating configurations between different Netgate devices housed in the same box."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"Its reliability and cost-effectiveness stand out."
"Fortinet currently has many products bundled with FortiGate including the basic firewall and load balancer, and I think that that they need to have separate product portfolios for each of these specialized services."
"Security is a continuous process. In every product, there is a requirement for improvement. Its pricing should also be improved according to Indian market requirements. They must also improve on the reporting part. Its reporting can be more precise. If we can get a real-time report in a specific format, it will be helpful for customers to know about the current status of their security."
"The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement."
"Its reporting and pricing need improvement."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the protection, it did not prevent us from being attacked. Additionally, Fortinet FortiGate could provide more features for WAF devices. I should not have to purchase two solutions, it would be a benefit to combine these features into one solution."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive."
"We have the product deployed on Azure China. One crucial concern is the version limitation; unfortunately, in Azure China, we are restricted to running version R80. Our architecture has a Load Balancer, VMSS CloudGuard, etc. The duplication in this setup prevents the application from seeing the original client IP. This poses a problem for certain applications that require the original IP for login purposes. Although we managed a workaround with a different architecture involving a WAF, it is not as straightforward as the standard Azure setup."
"Greater automation would reduce the need for manual configuration and management."
"The relationship between AWS and Check Point could be better. We had issues related to the type of instance and how it interconnects with AWS or cloud-native solutions. We overcame the pain points that we had, and now, AWS is evolving in a way that will facilitate how Check Point works. Our pain points were minimized, but they were there."
"We miss full blade support for all blades that are compatible with the cluster. Especially notable is the lack of support for Identity Awareness in active standby environments for customers. In our setup, transitioning to Connective clusters would be preferable for maintaining connections during failover situations."
"Most clients nowadays tend to move to the cloud and their data security is key. If CloudGuard could be able to give the client that full visibility of how their data is protected on the cloud, then that would be a great selling point for Check Point."
"The convergence time between cluster members is still not perfect. It's far away from what we get in traditional appliances. If a company wants to move mission-critical applications for an environment to the cloud, it somehow has to accept that it could have downtime of up to 40 seconds, until cluster members switch virtual IP addresses between themselves and start accepting the traffic. That is a little bit too high in my opinion. It's not fully Check Point's fault, because it's a hybrid mechanism with AWS. The blame is 50/50."
"Sometimes, if you aren't familiar with the solution, it can be a bit complex, but it does become easier to use with time. However, every time they launch a new version, it becomes more complex and you need to take time to get familiar with all the changes. For every version that they upgrade, you need to upskill yourself."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"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."
"Web interface could be enhanced and more user friendly."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"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."
"They can improve the dynamic of the input of IPs from outside."
"The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult."
More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Pricing and Cost Advice →
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 112 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is rated 8.6, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security writes "The solution has good threat emulation, threat extraction, and reporting features". 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 CloudGuard Network Security is most compared with Azure Firewall, VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Cisco Secure Workload, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, Cisco Secure Firewall and KerioControl. See our Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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