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."One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"Security, SD-WAN, and Streetscape are valuable features."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"Web filtering and two-factor authentication are great features."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"At our peak time, we have reached more than 5,000 concurrent connections."
"The initial setup is not complex."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home."
"It is effective. We have not had any problems."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and the capture photo."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten since we never faced any issues."
"Being an application-based firewall, this is one of the critical focus factors along with the threat prevention services it provides."
"We have found that Palo Alto Networks WildFire is scalable. We currently have six thousand users for the product."
"The cloud-based services are a nice feature."
"The most valuable feature is the cloud-based protection against zero-day malware attacks."
"It catches modified signatures of known viruses."
"The scalability is acceptable."
"The solution is scalable."
"It would be nice if FortiGate incorporated some built-in endpoint protection features. I would also like a built-in SOC dashboard for managing multiple Fortinet firewalls."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"You do need some IT knowledge in order to effectively work with the solution."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"pfSense could improve by having a sandboxing feature that I have seen in SonicWall. However, maybe it is available I am not aware of it."
"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."
"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."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"Web interface could be enhanced and more user friendly."
"The integration should be improved."
"Layer 7 advanced firewall features are not included in the solution."
"It should integrate with LDAP, Active Directory, etc, to improve the way in which the traces and connections of each IP, or user connected through the firewall, are shown."
"I would like to see them continue on their developmental roadmap for the product."
"I don't think it needs to improve anything, except maybe the speed to deploy the changes."
"When comparing this solution to others it is not as good overall."
"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."
"Any enhancements should likely be focused on the firewall appliance to further strengthen overall security capabilities, such as refining app and user identity features."
"The free version does not have real-time updates. It is slow."
"The initial setup was a little bit complex, mainly due to the GUI console and management challenges."
"The cost of this solution could still be improved, in particular, giving product discounts for charitable causes."
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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