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 ability to set up remote systems is the most valuable feature."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"This version is stable. I don't have any issues with this solution, in our environment, it works well."
"One of the nice things about FortiGate is that it can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises. You can actually do both. That's the biggest reason why I stick with this solution as opposed to something like Cisco Meraki. Another nice thing is that I can log directly into a FortiGate or get to it through their FortiCloud access products. They're pretty reliable and consistent. One of the reasons why I started using the product was their single pane of management. I can deploy their line of firewalls in conjunction with their switching and access points, and I can manage the entire network from one interface. I don't have to log into one interface for the firewall, another one for the access points, and another one for the switches. These firewalls have access point controller functionality built right into the system, so I don't even have to purchase additional devices to manage them."
"LinkGreat firewall capabilities"
"We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"The tools' most valuable feature is load balancing."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"I can manage it easily by myself."
"The plugins or add-ons are most valuable. Sometimes, they are free of charge, and sometimes, you have to pay for them, but you can purchase or download very valuable plugins or add-ons to perform internal testing of your network and simulate a denial-of-service attack or whichever attack you want to simulate. You can also remote and monitor your network and see where the gap is. Did you forget a printer port? Most attacks at the moment are happening through printers, and they can tell you immediately that you forgot to close the port of the printer. There are more than one million printers that are in danger, and everybody knows that hackers are using them to enter the network. So, you can download plugins to protect your network."
"Centralized administration with multiple services, which allows for execution in several important functionalities of information security."
"For everyday tasks, we just get alerts. It's anything that's suspicious, including from our Netgate. So, it's part of how we maintain cybersecurity in our school. This is working alongside our endpoint security solution."
"Scalable ATP solution that's quick to set up. It demonstrates good performance and stability."
"Their technical support is outstanding and top-notch."
"The most valuable features of Palo Alto Networks WildFire are the good URL and file analysis that uses artificial intelligence. It has different interfaces, such as rest, SMTP protocol, and HTTPS. The Security incidents and event management are very good. Additionally, there are many file types that are supported and there is no limit to the number of files it can handle simultaneously. It integrates well with SIEM solutions."
"The solution is easy to use and the Panorama feature is good. The software management or the malware blocking and some authentication management system are good."
"Installing this product as a datacenter firewall for segregation and segmentation, and also configuring policies between zones has improved my organization."
"My primary use case for this solution is for a secure gateway."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten since we never faced any issues."
"With this product, we receive the best monitoring and reports."
"FortiOS is not simple."
"We sometimes have issues with FortiGate's routing table in the latest firmware update. We had to downgrade the device because our customers complained about bugs."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"I believe improving integration with various antivirus vendors could be beneficial."
"User interface is a little clumsy."
"Many people have problems setting up the web cache for the web system."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"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."
"If you want to take advantage of all of the solution's options, you need to have a bit of a technical background. It's not for a layperson."
"I would give this product a rating of 9 out of 10 due to some slight issues of performance."
"The cost of this solution could still be improved, in particular, giving product discounts for charitable causes."
"In the future, Palo Alto could reduce the time it takes to process the file."
"The support is good but they could be faster."
"The cost of the solution is excessively high."
"As a firewall and 360 degrees of security, there needs to be more maturity."
"Palo Alto Networks WildFire should be more real-time in nature. The signature updates should happen in a minute or less than a minute to be a very good feature for the customer."
"The configuration should be made a little bit easier. I understand why it is as it is, but there should be a way to make it easier from the user side."
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, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox and Microsoft Defender for Office 365.
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