We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Smoothwall Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."It is user friendly, and has all the features you need."
"It's very easy to configure."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"We use the FortiGate Sandbox to detect zero-day vulnerabilities, such as anomalies or malware, that are unknown and have not yet been discovered."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"The solution can scale well."
"This solution made it very easy to manage our bandwidth."
"Firewall system for small, medium, and large data networks. It allows you to provide security to your environment: DMZ networks, LAN, WAN, etc."
"The most valuable features of pfSense are security, user-friendliness, and helpful online management."
"It works. I put pfSense in, and it works. I can't think of any trouble I ever had with it. It runs on heat-sensitive appliances. They don't need a fan, so they don't overheat. It is affordable, fast, and very high-speed. It is built on BSD Unix, and it pretty much runs on any Intel processor."
"The flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and the capture photo."
"I like pfSense's reports and how I can control access to the policies on the firewall."
"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."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It was easy to initially deploy it."
"There are problems with the custom reporting of the unique traffic. The data is there, but it is too difficult for us to extract."
"This product needs to have an analysis feature, rather than having the analysis done through the integration of a different product."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"Its filtering is sometimes too precise or strict. We sometimes have to bypass and authorize some of the sites, but they get blocked. We know that they are trusted sites, but they are blocked, and we don't know why."
"The command line is complicated, and the interface could be better."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"I believe improving integration with various antivirus vendors could be beneficial."
"They can improve the dynamic of the input of IPs from outside."
"The access control aspect of the product could be improved."
"The Netgate forums and community don’t provide extensive discussions and topics related to every pfSense service."
"The integration should be improved."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"It would be great to add more to security."
"There are several levels of firewall configuration such as beginner, advanced, and expert configurations. At each level, it becomes more complex and more tricky to set up the firewall. For example, if you want to install the firewall on your computer system, it would be a lot easier if it just tells you that this is the internet NIC and this is the Wi-Fi NIC."
"There is room for improvement in the UI. They can improve it by making it so that everything is in one place, so we don't have to jump around to different pages."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Smoothwall Firewall is ranked 34th in Firewalls with 1 review. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Smoothwall Firewall is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Smoothwall Firewall writes "Offers good scalability and monitoring features ". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Smoothwall Firewall is most compared with OPNsense.
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