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."It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"Security, SD-WAN, and Streetscape are valuable features."
"Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable."
"FortiGate's web and URL filtering are unlike any other firewall I've used. The functionality of URL filtering in those solutions is problematic because everything is encrypted, and firewalls can't break that encryption protocol. Fortinet has an SSL proxy, so the encryption is done before the packet ever leaves the FortiGate. The URL filter is definitely one of the most helpful features."
"The simplicity of the product is great. It's very easy to use, which is a compliment we get all the time in terms of feedback."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a security device. It can optimize security on the networks of a company. It actually protects the company from attacks from outside. With FortiGate, you can categorize the users. You can create a group of users that can access all of the websites for their work. You can limit other users' access."
"The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was straightforward."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"It is very easy to use. The interface is quite understandable. There is a good community, and I can take over at any time I want. If there is anything wrong with it, I could just reinstall the whole thing and start all over again, and I'll be up again in less than a few minutes"
"The concurrent users are perfect for us."
"The built-in open VPN and the VPN Client Export are the solution's most valuable aspects."
"An incomparable stability is achieved with other firewall systems."
"I had some outages in the network and we provide services for our company. We sell mobile credits. The terminal gets access to our own server inside the network and if one internet fails, then the other one is still up and we have a back-up link on the devices."
"The interface is straightforward and easy to use."
"I'm the expert when it comes to Linux systems, however, with the pfSense, due to the web interface, the rest of the staff can actually make changes to it as required without me worrying about whether they've opened up ports incorrectly or not. The ease of use for non-expert staff is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the Automatic Verdict, to recognize whether something is a threat, or not."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is how it keeps up-to-date with viruses."
"It is stable and pretty much scalable."
"I give the initial setup an eight out of ten."
"Installing this product as a datacenter firewall for segregation and segmentation, and also configuring policies between zones has improved my organization."
"Detailed reporting on analysis of content. The inspections are easily applied to security policy profiles and profile groups, and may be assigned on a per-rule basis."
"Remote access is excellent."
"WildFire's application encryption is useful."
"The reports are very basic."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the protection, it did not prevent us from being attacked. Additionally, Fortinet FortiGate could provide more features for WAF devices. I should not have to purchase two solutions, it would be a benefit to combine these features into one solution."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"The scalability could be better."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"We have an issue with hotel guest vouchers."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"Ease of use is a problem for a user who is unfamiliar with this product because, in the interface, everything has to be set manually."
"The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult."
"I tried pfSense, and it has a big issue with file system consistency, and this is what drove me to OPNsense. The file system stability is quite a big issue for us. We have a lot of outages related to power issues, and OPNsense is much more stable on this side."
"I would like to see multiple DNS servers running on individual interfaces."
"The main problem with pfSense is that we have to use proxy solutions."
"The solution could be more user-friendly, and the graphical interface needs some work so that someone without an IT background can use the application. I would like the ability to manage the on-premise appliance from the cloud. When I'm not in the office, it would be great to connect to the pfSense server and administer the network remotely."
"There's a bit of a learning curve during the initial implementation."
"There are some formats that the solution cannot support ."
"The deployment model could be better."
"In the future, Palo Alto could reduce the time it takes to process the file."
"The initial setup was complex."
"It's not really their problem, it's a problem across the board. There will always be problems with interrupted traffic. We have to set it up where we're playing a middle man game where we're stripping it out, looking at it, and then putting it back together and sending it on its way. That requires CPU cycles. And there's some overhead with that."
"As a firewall and 360 degrees of security, there needs to be more maturity."
"The cost of the solution is excessively high."
"The support is good but they could be faster."
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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