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."
"There is an easy process for configuring it, and it is straightforward to implement the device from scratch."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"The most important features of Fortinet FortiGate are the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and firewall control applications."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"The user interface (UI) is very, very good."
"We can easily track unauthorized users and see where traffic is going."
"The features I found most valuable in this solution, are the overall security features."
"The ASA 55-x range is a solid and reliable firewall. It secures the traffic for normal purposes."
"It's very scalable. You can go to different models of the ASAs and they scale up to as big as you want to go."
"The feature my customers find the most valuable is the exportability."
"All the rules are secure and we haven't had a significant malware attack in the five years that we've been using ASA Firewall. It has been a tremendous improvement for our network. However, I can't quantify the benefits in monetary terms."
"The implementation is pretty straightforward."
"It's a flexible solution."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"It is effective. We have not had any problems."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"The interface is straightforward and easy to use."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"I am happy with the EPLS, the radius, and I am happy with the captive portal."
"The intrusion detection feature is the most valuable. It is an open-source firewall, so there is a lot of material on it. I also find the open VPN capability very nice. It is pretty customizable. The clustering and the high availability are the two biggest things to be able to get out of a firewall."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding enhancements to FortiMail, FortiSOAR, and FortiDeceptor."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"The solution is very expensive."
"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."
"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've become quite expensive."
"You have to know the ASA command line very well because not all operations are available in the graphical interface"
"The product would be improved if the GUI could be brought into the 21st Century."
"The inclusion of an autofill feature would improve the ease of commands."
"The Cisco Firewall UI could be improved."
"We had an event recently where we had inbound traffic for SIP and we experienced an attack against our SIP endpoint, such that they were able to successfully make calls out... Both CTR, which is gathering data from multiple solutions that the vendor provides, as well as the FMC events connection, did not show any of those connections because there was not a NAT inbound which said either allow it or deny it."
"In the past though, colleagues have had issues during the upgrade process. The failover didn't work and production was down."
"Comparing Cisco solution to others, it is expensive, it would be better for it to be cheaper."
"We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"It needs to be more secure."
"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."
"We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs."
"The stability could be improved."
"The usage reports can be better."
"Also, the GUI is helpful, but it's not user-friendly. It's complicated. It should be more intuitive for the average user and have an excellent graphical view. Of course, the user will typically know about network administration, but it still should be easy to understand."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
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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