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.
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"Whenever we raise a complaint with FortiGate, their response and resolution times are minimal."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"Their interface is very easy to use, it is without bugs."
"This solution made our organization more secure and gave us better control."
"It is easy to create interfaces and routing, which all can be done at the GUI level."
"We definitely feel more secure. We have more control over things going in and out of our network."
"They wanted to leverage something which is equivalent that can give them the next gen features like application awareness and intrusion protection. So that is a major reason they were looking forward to this. The original ASA firewall did not have these features. This was the major reason the customer moved on to Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD). Now they can go ahead and leverage those functionalities."
"We can shift traffic, block certain content, or redirect policies."
"FMC is very good in terms of giving a lot of visibility into what the firewall is seeing, what it's stopping, and what it's letting through. It lets the administrator have a little bit of knowledge of what's coming in or out of the device. It's excellent."
"The most valuable features for my client are the ASDM and monitoring."
"It helped us a lot with our VPNs for the home office during COVID. There has been more security and flexibility for VPNs and other applications."
"An incomparable stability is achieved with other firewall systems."
"It is a stable solution."
"A valuable feature is that the solution is open source."
"The tools' most valuable feature is load balancing."
"The ability to perform packet captures on the command line and via the GUI is useful for diagnosing problems."
"The most valuable features of pfSense are the reports, monitoring, filtration, and blocking incoming and outgoing traffic."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"As far as wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you."
"Vulnerability scanning could be improved."
"It would be a benefit if Fortinet would release a one-stop solution that is better integrated with other products and an automated emergency response system."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"It would be good if they had fewer updates."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"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."
"The virtual firewalls don't work very well with Cisco AnyConnect."
"When we talk about data centers, we are talking about 100 gig capacity or 400 gig capacity. When it comes to active-active solution clustering and resilience and performance, Cisco should look into these a little bit more."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"Cisco wasn't first-to-market with NGFWs... they should look at what other vendors are doing and try not only to be on the same wavelength but a little bit better."
"Intrusion prevention, we currently need to apply deep bracket inspection manually to use web filtering."
"The solution could offer better control that would allow the ability to restrictions certain features from a website."
"The software was very buggy, to the point it had to be removed."
"An area of improvement for this solution is the console visualization."
"The security could be improved."
"The integration of pfSense with EPS and EDS could be better. Also, it should be easier to get reports on how many users are connecting simultaneously and how sections connect in real-time."
"The solution’s interface must be improved."
"I've never tried it in large environments. All my clients are small businesses with a handful of employees, so I am not sure how it works in large environments. I keep up with recent versions, and there's nothing I'm waiting for, and nothing breaks when I get a new version."
"It requires more attention to provide a better alternative for open source to small government or educational institutions with reduced budgets in terms of technology."
"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."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
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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