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 most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"The pricing is great and very reasonable."
"The product is easy to use and is stable. The SV1 functionality is a benefit."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"The next-gen features, the unified threat management capabilities are something that just about everybody is interested in at this point."
"The features that prevent internet connections, the filtering are the most valuable because we did not have any internet protection before."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Good basic firewall features."
"The gain in performance and security from configuring the VPN connections was significant."
"It is a good firewall with good performance."
"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."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"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."
"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 scalability is acceptable."
"WildFire's application encryption is useful."
"The reporting feature helps our performance."
"High availability with active-active and active-passive modes."
"I like the analysis they apply to the unknown files, and I think they have good technology to use as a sandboxing tool. I didn't find something similar to WildFire in the marketplace."
"The most valuable features of this solution are sandbox capabilities."
"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 completely integrated with all the other Palo Alto products. I think that it is the best part for endpoint protection. The firewall features include URL and DNS filtering, threat protection, and antivirus."
"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."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs."
"It claims it does DLP, but the degree and level of controls are very basic."
"In the balance between links feature normally you can just choose one option to balance. It would be better for the solution to have more than one option, preferably three."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"I think that the infrastructure for the VPN could be improved. The way that it is bundled also made it difficult to use and sell as it is too expensive."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"pfSense is not user-friendly. I hope to have something to make the interfaces more user-friendly."
"The router monitoring needs improvement when compared with Sonicwall."
"I would like to see multiple DNS servers running on individual interfaces."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"The GUI could use improvements, though it is manageable."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"Also, the GUI is helpful, but it's not user-friendly. It's complicated. It should be more intuitive for the average user and have an excellent graphical view. Of course, the user will typically know about network administration, but it still should be easy to understand."
"The VPN and decryption need improvement."
"I would like to see them continue on their developmental roadmap for the product."
"The price could be better."
"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."
"The product fails to offer protection when dealing with high-severity vulnerabilities, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The global product feature needs improvement, the VPN, and we need some enhanced features."
"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."
"Management and web filtering can be improved. There should also be better reporting, particularly around web filtering."
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 Cloudflare.
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