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."FortiGate firewalls are easy to manage through a user-friendly web interface. They also have advanced features like DDoS and DLP. However, I wouldn't recommend enabling all of these features on one device because it can cause performance issues."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"This product is definitely scalable."
"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."
"The wireless control is helpful."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"The solution can scale well."
"The signature database and zero-day detection are Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features."
"This solution has helped our organization by protecting our network from attacks."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"I use pfSense because it gives me the flexibility to greatly expand basic firewall features."
"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."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"The documentation is very good."
"The scalability is very good, where you can do an HA configuration and then bring in another box, if necessary."
"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."
"Scalable ATP solution that's quick to set up. It demonstrates good performance and stability."
"The most valuable feature of Palo Alto Networks WildFire is its ability to adapt to environments and its robustness."
"Being an application-based firewall, this is one of the critical focus factors along with the threat prevention services it provides."
"The reporting feature helps our performance."
"The scalability is acceptable."
"The most effective feature of WildFire for threat analysis is its collaboration with other security profiles on our Palo Alto firewall."
"The most valuable features of the solution are user-friendliness, price, good security, and cloud-related options."
"The reports are very basic."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"The pricing could always be better."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"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."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"The access control aspect of the product could be improved."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"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 SD1 integration into the software. That would be fantastic."
"It requires more attention to provide a better alternative for open source to small government or educational institutions with reduced budgets in terms of technology."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"We have not had any problems with it, and we also do not have a need for any new features. If anything, its reporting can be better. Sophos has better reporting than pfSense. Sophos has more detailed information. pfSense is not as detailed. It is summarized."
"The Netgate forums and community don’t provide extensive discussions and topics related to every pfSense service."
"I would give this product a rating of 9 out of 10 due to some slight issues of performance."
"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 price of WildFire should be reduced in order to make it more affordable for our customers."
"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."
"Palo Alto Networks WildFire could improve by adding support for manual submission of suspicious files and URLs. Additionally, it would be an advantage to add rule-based analysis. Currently, it uses only static and AI. We need to be able to analyze archive files."
"The only problem with this solution is the cost. It's expensive."
"Our main concern is that everything has to be synced with the WildFire Cloud and has to be checked through the subscription."
"The global product feature needs improvement, the VPN, and we need some enhanced features."
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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