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.
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"It's very easy to configure."
"The solution is extremely reliable."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"The security on offer is very good."
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"The technical support is excellent. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. When there has been an issue, we have had a good response from them."
"Application inspection, network segmentation, and encrypted traffic detection or encrypted traffic analysis (ETA) are valuable for our customers."
"Being able to use it as a policy-based VPN is valuable. It's very easy to understand. It's very easy to troubleshoot."
"The most valuable feature is zone segmentation, which we utilize through the Firepower management console."
"The ASA 55-x range is a solid and reliable firewall. It secures the traffic for normal purposes."
"The most valuable feature of the Firepower solution is FireSIGHT, which can be easily managed and is user-friendly."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It is a good firewall with good performance."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"Firewall system for small, medium, and large data networks. It allows you to provide security to your environment: DMZ networks, LAN, WAN, etc."
"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."
"Sophos Intercept X is scalable. Currently, we have almost 30 people using it in our company."
"Good basic firewall features."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"The solution is very expensive."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"It needs to improve its ISP load balancing."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"It would be better if we could manage all of our firewalls as a set rather than individually. I would like to see a single pane of glass type of option. We also use another vendor's firewalls and they have a centralized management infrastructure that we have implemented. This infrastructure is a bit easier to manage."
"I think the ASA layer is thin. It's always Layer 3 or Layer 4 source controller and doesn't control the Layer 7 traffic. It's important, and you'll need an additional firewall."
"I believe that the current feature set of the device is very good and the only thing that Cisco should work on is improving the user experience with the device."
"I'm working on a slightly older version, but what it needs is a better alert management. It's pretty standard, but there's no real advanced features involved around it."
"The inclusion of an autofill feature would improve the ease of commands."
"The content filtering on an application level is not as good as other solutions such as Palo Alto."
"The maturity needs to be better."
"In a future release, it would be ideal if they could offer an open interface to other security products so that we could easily connect to our own open industry standard."
"The hotspot and the portal feature in this solution are not stable for WiFi access. We use it at least once or twice every day and it crashes. Some modules can be better by improving detection and having new updates. Additionally, we have some issues with clustering and load balancing that could improve."
"Layer 7 advanced firewall features are not included in the solution."
"The VPN feature of the solution could improve by adding better functionality and providing easier configure ability."
"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 believe improving integration with various antivirus vendors could be beneficial."
"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."
"It should integrate with LDAP, Active Directory, etc, to improve the way in which the traces and connections of each IP, or user connected through the firewall, are shown."
"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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