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.
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"The security on offer is very good."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"They provide DDoS protection and multi-factor authentication. That is a good option as it enables work-from-home functionality."
"It's a flexible solution."
"The feature I find most valuable is the Cisco VPN Interconnection."
"With the pandemic, people began working from home. That was a pretty big move, having all our users working from a home. More capacity needed to be added to our remote VPN. ASA did this very well."
"The product is easy to manage and simple. It works with the rest of our Cisco products. You can drop in new ones if you need more performance. The training and documentation provided are good."
"Cisco's technical support is the best and that's why everybody implements their products."
"The most valuable feature is that it's secure."
"Implementing Cisco Secure Firewall has saved us time because we rely on most of the out-of-the-box signatures. It has reduced the time and effort spent in configuration within the security network."
"Its reliability and cost-effectiveness stand out."
"The GUI is easy to understand."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"The initial setup is not complex."
"This solution has increased the level of security, given us more control, provided a deep insight into network traffic, and is a great VPN solution."
"It is a good firewall with good performance."
"The improvement is related to logs. Instead of the CLI, we should be able to have more insights into the logs of the firewall in the GUI."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"In the balance between links feature normally you can just choose one option to balance. It would be better for the solution to have more than one option, preferably three."
"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."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"The UI could be improved."
"There could be more integration between the logging and analytical platforms to make it more seamless and integrated."
"The stability is not the best."
"I would like for them to develop better integration with other security platforms."
"Cisco Secure Firewall should be easier to handle. It uses ASDM, which is not easy to understand. It would be better if there was direct access via HTTPS."
"The inclusion of an autofill feature would improve the ease of commands."
"These firewalls are not for beginners."
"The integration between different tools could be improved. For example, with SecureX, I am yet to find out how to forward security events to different tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, which is what we use for log detection."
"Sometimes, it is not easy to troubleshoot. You need to know where to go. It took me quite awhile. It's like, "Okay, if it doesn't go smoothly here, then go find the documentation." Once you do it, it is not so bad. However, it is sometimes a steep learning curve on the troubleshooting part of it."
"The SSL VPN is, and always has been, painful to configure and the Java plugin does not guarantee a uniform deployment."
"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."
"I tried pfSense, and it has a big issue with file system consistency, and this is what drove me to OPNsense. The file system stability is quite a big issue for us. We have a lot of outages related to power issues, and OPNsense is much more stable on this side."
"It needs to be more secure."
"It would be great to add more to security."
"User interface is a little clumsy."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"Could be simplified for new users."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 112 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 15 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Includes multiple tools that help manage and troubleshoot, but needs SD-WAN for load balancing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". 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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