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 next-gen features, the unified threat management capabilities are something that just about everybody is interested in at this point."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"With FortiClient, you can easily connect when you are home, check out what you want to do, and connect to your network when you are not at work. You can switch on servers and you can check what is wrong."
"Their interface is very easy to use, it is without bugs."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"The web filtering facility and application control are the most valuable features from the point of view of our clients. The VPN feature is also quite popular amongst our clients. Two-factor authentication is one of the good features in Fortinet. These features are important for the current scenario of security. Security has become a necessity nowadays. With cyber-attacks becoming more common, protecting an organization's data is one of the major tasks. It is also very stable and scalable, and it is very straightforward to configure. Their technical support is also good."
"The main features of this solution are customization and ease to use."
"The flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"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."
"The solution is very robust."
"A very stable product that lasts over time, easy to understand, and administer."
"pfSense is a nice product, and I find that there's a lot of information out there. There are some good tutorials on YouTube and other websites with helpful information."
"It has a good web cache. I used to use a DHCP server and DNS server. For my company, I use pfSense as a load balancing application."
"I have found pfSense to be stable."
"With this product, we receive the best monitoring and reports."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten since we never faced any issues."
"What I like about Palo Alto is that it is a complete product, with everything in it."
"Stability is never a concern."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The analysis is very fast."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"To the best of my knowledge, Fortinet does not have a CASB solution and Fortinet does not have a Zero trust solution."
"The stability of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"The inability to scale the FortiAnalyzer to match our growth necessitates the purchase of new hardware."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"The support system could be improved."
"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."
"Could be simplified for new users."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"The solution could use better reporting. They need to offer more of it in general. Right now, the graphics aren't the best. If you need to provide a report to a manager, for example, it doesn't look great. They need to make it easier to understand and give users the ability to customize them."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"Many people have problems setting up the web cache for the web system."
"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."
"The cost of the solution is excessively high."
"The threat intelligence that we receiving in the reporting was not as expected. We were expecting more. Additionally, we should be able to whitelist a specific file based on a variety of attributes."
"The cost of this solution could still be improved, in particular, giving product discounts for charitable causes."
"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 fails to offer protection when dealing with high-severity vulnerabilities, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The system performance degrades after the solution has been deployed for some time. The data that it gives us becomes a little bit slow. When you try to get some data for troubleshooting, it seems like it's working hard to extract that data."
"The initial setup was complex."
"As a firewall and 360 degrees of security, there needs to be more maturity."
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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