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 solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"FortiGate SD-WAN facilitated a smooth transition for our customers between their two internet service providers, ensuring uninterrupted connectivity without any downtime."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"Fortinet FortiGate is stable. It's used across all the countries, this is the way most multinationals run their system."
"The most valuable feature is the web filter."
"The technical support in our region is excellent."
"The features I have found most valuable are the ASA firewalls. I like to have features like most integrated systems in ACI."
"Easy to deploy in a working environment between servers and users."
"It is a comprehensive suite and complete package."
"Being able to determine our active users vs inactive users has led us to increased productivity through visibility. Also, if an issue was happening with our throughput, then we wouldn't know without research. Now, notifications are more proactively happening."
"The most valuable feature that Cisco Firepower NGFW provides for us is the Intrusion policy."
"The feature that I found most valuable is the overall stability of the product."
"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."
"ASDM provides GUI for configurations. The ASDM has made configuring ASA easy. No need to memorize CLI commands."
"pfSense allows us to spread the hours of connection and do the filtering on the pfSense site."
"The main features of this solution are customization and ease to use."
"The solution has good customization abilities and plenty of features."
"I can manage it easily by myself."
"The ability to create a VPN allows me to monitor branch offices from a central location."
"Firewall system for small, medium, and large data networks. It allows you to provide security to your environment: DMZ networks, LAN, WAN, etc."
"It is easy to use and has integrity with other systems, such as proxies and quality of service."
"It is a better firewall than others and it has better features."
"The solution could have licensing fees reduced in the future."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"Its price could be better."
"It should have a better pricing plan. It is too expensive. It should also have a more granular view of the attack. I don't have FortiAnalyzer, and it is difficult for me to have a complete view when there is an attack on my server."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve the user interface. There should be more functionality and options through the GUI."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Some configuration elements cannot be easily altered once created."
"It can probably provide a holistic view of different appliances because many customers do not have only one brand, besides the traditional SNMP protocols, to cover all their devices. There are some specific requirements in terms of configurations or actions that sometimes have to be done in a very manual way because of the different versions or brands in a customer's infrastructure. It could also have some additional analytics capabilities. It has some very interesting ways to monitor the traffic and identify false positives from the architecture and the environment. It would be good if there is a way to patch with some other industry-specific solutions and synchronize some of the information, such as what other customers experience in their operations and probably share some additional information that could be leveraged or shared among the industry. Such information would be something interesting to see. It could have AI capabilities related to how the appliances could benefit from learning the current environment and different exposures."
"One of the challenges we've had with the Cisco ASA is the lack of a strong controller or central management console that is dependable and reliable all the time."
"Lacks a good graphical user interface."
"FMC could be improved because management with FMC is quite difficult compared to using Firepower web-based management."
"It is not the newest, cutting-edge technology"
"I would like to see more integration with third-party devices in general. There is great integration with Cisco devices, but there's not much integration with third-party devices."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"Cisco should redo their website so it's actually usable in a faster way."
"If you want to take advantage of all of the solution's options, you need to have a bit of a technical background. It's not for a layperson."
"There's a bit of a learning curve during the initial implementation."
"The GUI. There are TONS of plugins for pfSense, as such, if a user wants to add quite a bit of functionality, the GUI will feel a little congested."
"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."
"The VPN feature of the solution could improve by adding better functionality and providing easier configure ability."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"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 user interface can be improved to make it easier to add more features. And pfSense could be better integrated with other solutions, like antivirus."
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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