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.
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"The initial installation is very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"Customers want to load balance more than eight lines or six internet lines. FortiGate is the only solution that can accomplish this."
"The ability to set up remote systems is the most valuable feature."
"We are using the FortiGate 100D series. VPN, firewall, anti-malware, OTM, and intrusion prevention are useful features."
"The most valuable feature of FortiGate is FortiView which provides proactive monitoring."
"It has improved our security capabilities."
"It brings us the ability to work from anywhere and has allowed us to work remotely without having to incur a lot of other costs. If we didn't have this type of solution, since we have so many on-prem services that are required, we would have likely lost money and been unable to deliver. We have a video services team who helped build the content for our sporting events. When you are watching a Leaf game and those swipes come by as well as the clips and things, those are all generated in-house. Without the ability to access our on-premise resources, we would have been dead in the water. So, the return on that is pretty impressive."
"The most valuable features are the IPsec VPN and web filtering."
"One thing I like about the product is the logging features, the way it logs, the way it forwards the logs in Syslog."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"The command line is the same as it is on the Cisco iOS router."
"The stability of Cisco ASA is excellent compared to other products on the market. Because of our customer experience as an integrator company, our clients never report any performance problems. We have a good performance reputation with Cisco ASA."
"The solution's dashboard is fine, and in terms of support, Cisco is better than other OEMs in the market."
"Simple to deploy, stable."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"The initial setup is easy."
"A valuable feature is that the solution is open source."
"The scalability is very good, where you can do an HA configuration and then bring in another box, if necessary."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"Its scalability is a strong point."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"Centralized administration with multiple services, which allows for execution in several important functionalities of information security."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"The solution could be more user friendly."
"The sniffing packets or packet captures, can be simplified and improved because it's a little confusing."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"The performance could be a bit better. Right now, I find it to be lacking. Having good performance is very important for our work."
"They should allow customers to talk to them directly instead of having to go through the reseller."
"I would like to see the inclusion of more advanced antivirus features in the next release of this solution."
"It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience."
"The integration between the on-prem proxy world and the cloud proxy would benefit us. One single policy setting would make sense."
"It is slowly not supported and other vendors are a few years ahead of Cisco in development."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"Maybe the dashboard could be a bit better."
"With the new FTD, there is a little bit of a learning curve."
"Layer 7 advanced firewall features are not included in the solution."
"The GUI could use improvements, though it is manageable."
"Other solutions provide more scope for growth. For instance, we can have only 10 to 20 employees on VPN, but other solutions can support more users. We also have more capabilities to increase the performance of the solution."
"The product must provide integration with other solutions."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
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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