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 SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"The SD-WAN function is very developed. It has SD-WAN functionality with security features in one device. We can manage from one single console SD-WAN and the security policy."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"Signature-based detection; user-defined signatures with regular expressions; integrated URL and content filtering; custom URL categories filtering."
"The stability is very good; there's no vagueness. Either it works or it doesn't, and it's also very easy to find out why."
"A stable and solid solution for protection from external threats and for VPN connections."
"Logging is great. It will show when it reaches its capacity before it is too late, unless you have bursts of traffic."
"We have multiple secure internal networks linked with our plants. We are from a oil company, so we have multiple plant areas which need to have restricted network access. Therefore, we are using it for restricting access to the plant area."
"Cybersecurity resilience has been paramount. Because there is a threat of losing everything if ransomware or another sort of attack were to happen, the cybersecurity resilience has been top-notch."
"The IP filter configuration for specific political and Static NAT has been most valuable."
"VPN load balancing has been particularly essential for my connections to integrate via multiple time zones."
"This solution has helped our organization by protecting our network from attacks."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"I am happy with the EPLS, the radius, and I am happy with the captive portal."
"Its scalability is a strong point."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"The product’s documentation is good."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"The platform's interface could improve."
"The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"There is a lot of improvement needed with SSL-VPN."
"The solution is very expensive."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"I use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"It doesn't have a proper GUI to do troubleshooting, so most people have to rely on the command line."
"MSSP oriented interface: I would like a single console which would allow me to manage settings creating consistency across all customers."
"We don't have any serious problems. The firewall models that we have are quite legacy, and they have slower performance. We are currently investigating the possibility of migrating to next-generation firewalls."
"The license system is also good but it's not very impressive. It's a very regular licensing system. They call it a smart license which means that your device will connect to the internet. This is a little bit of a headache for some customers. It doesn't make the customer happy because most of the customers prefer not to connect their firewall or system to the internet."
"It is surprising that you need to have a virtual appliance for the Firepower Management Center. It is not good if you have to setup a VMware server just for it."
"Its configuration through GUI as well as CLI can be improved and made easier."
"The performance should be improved."
"I would say that in inexperienced hands, the interface can be kind of overwhelming. There are just a lot of options. Too much, if you don't know what you are looking for or trying to do."
"pfSense is not user-friendly. I hope to have something to make the interfaces more user-friendly."
"Many people have problems setting up the web cache for the web system."
"Improve analysis of logs and dashboards (control panel) with improved alert functionality."
"The user interface can be improved to make it easier to add more features. And pfSense could be better integrated with other solutions, like antivirus."
"The access control aspect of the product could be improved."
"As an open-source solution, there are so many loopholes happening within the product. By design, no one is taking ownership of it, and that is worrisome to me."
"There is more demand for UTMs than a simple firewall. pfSense should support real-time features for handling the latest viruses and threats. It should support real-time checks and real-time status of threats. Some other vendors, such as Fortinet, already offer this type of capability. Such capability will be good for bringing pfSense at the same level as other solutions."
"More documentation would be great, especially on new features because sometimes, when new features come out, you don't get to understand them right off the bat. You have to really spend a lot of time understanding them. So, more documentation would be awesome."
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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