We performed a comparison between Cisco IOS Security and Netgate pfSense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Fortinet FortiGate appears to be scalable."
"We have found it to be very reliable and that's why our teams and various users in our company use it as our main firewall every day."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"This product is definitely scalable."
"Anti-Spam web content filterinG."
"The Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."
"The FortiGate controls the user's activities and maximizes my bandwidth use overall."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"We are able to filter a lot of traffic especially when a lot of the traffic is in layer 7."
"The solution effectively integrates with Umbrella."
"Cisco IOS allows us to keep the same security features as our principal offices."
"Cisco has always been a premium product. There's a lot of other entry-level solutions. This is more robust."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability. The nice thing with the bigger vendors is that they're very good at scale."
"The product has valuable features for business intelligence."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco IOS Security is posturing."
"The classic features such as content inspection, content protection, and the application-level firewall, are the most important."
"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."
"This solution has increased the level of security, given us more control, provided a deep insight into network traffic, and is a great VPN solution."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"A valuable feature is that the solution is open source."
"Content protection, content inspection, and the application level firewall."
"pfSense is a nice product, and I find that there's a lot of information out there. There are some good tutorials on YouTube and other websites with helpful information."
"The most valuable feature, for instance, is the ease of migrating configurations between different Netgate devices housed in the same box."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"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."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"It needs to improve its ISP load balancing."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"It does not have key authentication for admin access."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"The UTM filtering needs improvement."
"I think setup could be one area for improvement, because sometimes we don't have people inside so we have to move to the place."
"It would be ideal if the solution had more capacity."
"If they could increase the performance a little better because the device sometimes gets slow."
"The configuration and reporting interfaces need a lot of improvement. It needs to be more accessible forsolide without a strong technical background. If you had a simplified dashboard, the lower-level techs could manage the solution and provide services. Cisco IOS Security requires someone who is highly trained to operate it."
"We need to pay for the license and it is expensive."
"Sometimes I find it difficult to manage. Some configurations are difficult for new engineers, for example."
"The initial setup is complicated."
"Cisco is an expensive firewall, so the pricing can be improved."
"It is not centrally managed, where you log into the website and can see all your services there. We would like to be able to see is all the configurations from a central interface on all our pfSenses."
"I would like to see pfSense integrate WireGuard. Currently, pfSense uses OpenVPN, and there's nothing wrong with it, but WireGuard is a lot leaner and meaner."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
"When I checked other packages, it seems they use different tools that are installed on the PSS for functionality. They rely on third-party tools, unlike Fortinet, for example, which has its own tools. In comparison, we also use third-party tools on pfSense. For example, we had a situation where we needed a tool to identify authorized users, and when I searched for a solution, I found a third-party tool. However, using such tools may come with additional costs."
"User interface is a little clumsy."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"There is more demand for UTMs than a simple firewall. pfSense should support real-time features for handling the latest viruses and threats. It should support real-time checks and real-time status of threats. Some other vendors, such as Fortinet, already offer this type of capability. Such capability will be good for bringing pfSense at the same level as other solutions."
"pfSense could improve by having a sandboxing feature that I have seen in SonicWall. However, maybe it is available I am not aware of it."
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco IOS Security writes "User-friendly and excels in documentation, making it easier to resolve issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Meraki MX, Fortinet FortiOS, OPNsense and Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering with PAN-DB, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Cisco IOS Security vs. Netgate pfSense report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
