We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Palo Alto Networks WildFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."The security fabric is excellent."
"The base firewall features are quite valuable to us."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"Centralized monitoring, policy management, and virtualized appliances allow us to take control over our public and private infrastructure."
"The solution is very easy to use and configure."
"I use pfSense because it gives me the flexibility to greatly expand basic firewall features."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"It is easy to use and has integrity with other systems, such as proxies and quality of service."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"A free firewall that is a good network security appliance."
"A valuable feature is that the solution is open source."
"The most valuable feature is the Automatic Verdict, to recognize whether something is a threat, or not."
"We have found that Palo Alto Networks WildFire is scalable. We currently have six thousand users for the product."
"I love the idea of Palo Alto Networks WildFire. It's more geared toward preventing malware. If someone's laptop or phone is malware-infected, the tool prevents it from uploading valuable corporate data outside the corporate network. That's what I love about Palo Alto Networks WildFire. It stops malware in its tracks."
"Remote access is excellent."
"It gives a more accurate assessment of a virus in terms of whether it's truly a virus, malware, or a false positive. We have some legacy software that could pop up as being something that is malware. WildFire goes through and inspects it, and then it comes back and lets us know if it's a false positive. Usually, when it finds out that it's not a virus, it lets us know that it's benign, and it can exclude it from that scan, which means I don't even have to worry about that one popping up anymore."
"It has a user-friendly interface."
"The way that the solution quickly updates to adjust to threats is the solution's most valuable aspect. When there's a security attack, within five minutes, all Wildfire subscribers have access to updates so that all systems will be safe. Its threat prevention is way better than other vendor products."
"The solution is scalable."
"At first glance, the interface for the device is very confusing."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"It claims it does DLP, but the degree and level of controls are very basic."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"The performance and speed are aspects of the solution that could always be improved upon."
"FortiLink is the interface on the firewall that allows you to extend switch management across all of your switches in the network. The problem with it is that you can't use multiple interfaces unless you set them up in a lag. Only then you can run them. So, it forces you to use a core type of switch to propagate that management out to the rest of the switches, and then it is running the case at 200. It leaves you with 18 ports on the firewall because it is also a layer-three router that could also be used as a switch, but as soon as you do that, you can't really use them. They could do a little bit more clean up in the way the stacking interface works. Some use cases and the documentation on the FortiLink checking interface are a little outdated. I can find stuff on version 5 or more, but it is hard to find information on some of the newer firmware. The biggest thing I would like to see is some improvement in the switch management feature. I would like to be able to relegate some of the ports, which are on the firewall itself, to act as a switch to take advantage of those ports. Some of these firewalls have clarity ports on them. If I can use those, it would mean that I need to buy two less switches, which saves time. I get why they don't, but I would still like to see it because it would save a little bit of space in the server rack."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"There's a bit of a learning curve during the initial implementation."
"They can improve the dynamic of the input of IPs from outside."
"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."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"They could improve their commercial stance and be more agile when it comes to the commercial pricing of enterprise deals."
"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."
"I think it would be nice for Palo Alto to work without the connection to the cloud. It is 100% powerful when connected to the cloud. But, if you disconnect from the cloud, you only get 40-50% power."
"In terms of what I'd like to see in the next release of Palo Alto Networks WildFire, each release is based on malware that has been identified. The key problem is an average of six months from the time malware is written to the time it's discovered and a signature is created for it. The only advice that I can give is for them to shorten that timeframe. I don't know how they would do it, but if they shorten that, for example, cut it in half, they'll make themselves more famous."
"The product's false positive logs could be more user-friendly to understand. They could provide examples of precious cases to learn."
"In the future, I would like to see more automation in the reporting."
"The global product feature needs improvement, the VPN, and we need some enhanced features."
"The price could be better."
"The cost of this solution could still be improved, in particular, giving product discounts for charitable causes."
"They provide a medium level of technical support."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is rated 8.4. 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 Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Fortinet FortiSandbox and Microsoft Defender for Office 365.
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