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.
"The threat prevention is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"It can expand easily."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"This version is stable. I don't have any issues with this solution, in our environment, it works well."
"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."
"The features that prevent internet connections, the filtering are the most valuable because we did not have any internet protection before."
"SSL-VPN is very useful for us and has been very reliable."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"What I found the most valuable about Cisco Secure Firewall is that if a client is educated about the solution, it can help him or her avoid many problems and mistakes."
"Netting is one of the best features. We can modify it in different ways. Site-to-site VPN is also an awesome feature of Cisco ASA. The biggest advantage of Cisco products is technical support. They provide the best technical support."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Cisco Secure Firewall's security solutions, advanced malware protection, and DDoS communication are very good."
"When it comes to the integration among Cisco tools, we find it easy. It's a very practical integration with other components as well."
"The high-availability and remote VPN features are most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Firewall is its ease of configuration and that it's scalable for firewalls and VPNs."
"Cisco Secure Firewall improved our organization. We have it in every one of our French offices."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"The performance and functionality are good."
"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."
"The most valuable feature, for instance, is the ease of migrating configurations between different Netgate devices housed in the same box."
"A very stable product that lasts over time, easy to understand, and administer."
"I have found pfSense to be stable."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"Sophos Intercept X is scalable. Currently, we have almost 30 people using it in our company."
"The support system could be improved."
"The firmware needs improvement because there are bugs when a new release comes through. Sometimes, the configuration changes, and it's a bit harder to see where the fail is. The first time that you have the firmware, it tends to have some issues, and it's better to wait a bit to update the equipment."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"It could use more templates for third-party site-to-site VPN setups other than FortiGate and Cisco."
"The pricing could always be better."
"They should improve high CPU and memory usage that occurs."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"The performance could be a bit better. Right now, I find it to be lacking. Having good performance is very important for our work."
"The content filtering on an application level is not as good as other solutions such as Palo Alto."
"There is huge scope for improvement in URL filtering. The database that they have is not accurate. Their content awareness and categorization for URL filtering are not that great. We faced many challenges with their categorization and content awareness. They should improve these categorization issues."
"There's a little bit of a disconnect between Firepower’s management and the rest of the products, like DNA and Prime. The solution should have fewer admin portals for network, security, and firewalls."
"More intuitive support for SIP services are needed. This took a long time to configure properly for the user."
"A feature that would allow me to load balance among multiple ISPs, especially since we have deployed it as a perimeter firewall, would be a great addition."
"The ASAs are being replaced with the new Firepowers and they have a different type of structure in the configuration to be able to migrate from one to the other."
"it is not very user-friendly for the administration."
"They could improve by having more skilled, high-level engineers that are available around the clock. I know that's an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do."
"It is not centrally managed, where you log into the website and can see all your services there. We would like to be able to see is all the configurations from a central interface on all our pfSenses."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"The integration should be improved."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"The main problem with pfSense is that we have to use proxy solutions."
"Improve analysis of logs and dashboards (control panel) with improved alert functionality."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"It needs to be more secure."
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, Juniper SRX Series Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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