We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall vs. pfSense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco Secure Firewall and pfSense come out about equal in this comparison. Cisco ASA Firewall has a slight edge when it comes to service and support, but pfSense has an edge when it comes to pricing.
"It is simple to manage, and there are a lot of functionalities in the same box."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"The Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."
"It increases security posture and is helpful for firewall reporting, intrusion protection, web filtering, and SD-WAN implementation."
"It is a safe product."
"The dashboard I have found the most valuable in Fortinet FortiGate."
"We use the FortiGate Sandbox to detect zero-day vulnerabilities, such as anomalies or malware, that are unknown and have not yet been discovered."
"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 dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"The feature I find most valuable is the Cisco VPN Interconnection."
"The most valuable features are the IPsec VPN and web filtering."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is a good solution. In some ways, it is a reactive solution and we have it sitting in a whitelist mode rather than a blacklist mode. It seems to work fairly well for us."
"It has definitely improved our organization. It gives us remote connectivity, helps workers connect remotely, and also gives us good connectivity to our other branches."
"It's very scalable. You can go to different models of the ASAs and they scale up to as big as you want to go."
"At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement."
"Sourcefire has been a great addition. The visibility and control have been nice."
"A valuable feature is that the solution is open source."
"I am happy with the EPLS, the radius, and I am happy with the captive portal."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"The GUI is easy to understand."
"The tools' most valuable feature is load balancing."
"I mostly like all of it. Whatever we use is valuable."
"Creation of certificates and the facility to administer services are valuable features."
"It works. I put pfSense in, and it works. I can't think of any trouble I ever had with it. It runs on heat-sensitive appliances. They don't need a fan, so they don't overheat. It is affordable, fast, and very high-speed. It is built on BSD Unix, and it pretty much runs on any Intel processor."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have."
"Compared to some other products, the DLP is not at par for the moment."
"It should provide better visibility over the network and more information in the form of reports for the end users. Its installation should also be easier."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"We had a minor problem where there was a major system upgrade on the hardware platfrom and the Mac client was not available as soon as it might have been. The PC client was available immediately, but we had to wait a month or so, before there was a mac client. I was slightly irritated that it was not ready on time, but it was eventually resolved."
"You do need some IT knowledge in order to effectively work with the solution."
"Cisco Secure Firewall’s customer support could be improved."
"There was an error in the configuration, related to our uplink switches, that caused us to contact technical support, and it took a very long time to resolve the issue."
"They should allow customers to talk to them directly instead of having to go through the reseller."
"The content filtering on an application level is not as good as other solutions such as Palo Alto."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"The solution could offer better control that would allow the ability to restrictions certain features from a website."
"The ability to integrate (as options) all-in-one features -- like anti-spam, anti-virus, etc."
"The operation of the ASA is good but the problem is that whenever you require an upgrade, there are multiple pieces of software that you have to upgrade. Extensive planning is required, because if you upgrade one piece of the software it has to be compatible with the others as well. You always need to check the compatibility metrics."
"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 was difficult to configure our web printer through the solution. This process could be easier. Additionally, integration with SD-WAN solution."
"We are at the moment looking to use it as a proxy service so that we can limit what websites people go and view and that sort of thing. That's an area I've struggled with a little bit at the moment and it could be a bit easier to set up."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"Other solutions provide more scope for growth. For instance, we can have only 10 to 20 employees on VPN, but other solutions can support more users. We also have more capabilities to increase the performance of the solution."
"We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"The solution could be more user-friendly, and the graphical interface needs some work so that someone without an IT background can use the application. I would like the ability to manage the on-premise appliance from the cloud. When I'm not in the office, it would be great to connect to the pfSense server and administer the network remotely."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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