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 pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"The signature database and zero-day detection are Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features."
"We are a visual effects company, and there have been a number of high profile security issues in our industry. This has brought us to a higher standard of security, which our clients are very keen on these days."
"Our security improved from being able to put in rules and close off unwanted traffic."
"The security features are about the best that I've seen anywhere."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"The most valuable features of pfSense are security, user-friendliness, and helpful online management."
"The solution is very easy to use and configure."
"This solution has helped our organization by protecting our network from attacks."
"A very stable product that lasts over time, easy to understand, and administer."
"The performance and functionality are good."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"My company mainly works in the health and educational domain, schools and universities. I prevent the improper use of content from schools and universities. I defend the medical records for the patients in our hospitals. That is the main use case for me for the firewall."
"Remote access is excellent."
"It gives a more accurate assessment of a virus in terms of whether it's truly a virus, malware, or a false positive. We have some legacy software that could pop up as being something that is malware. WildFire goes through and inspects it, and then it comes back and lets us know if it's a false positive. Usually, when it finds out that it's not a virus, it lets us know that it's benign, and it can exclude it from that scan, which means I don't even have to worry about that one popping up anymore."
"The most valuable features are all of the security features in terms of protection and SSL and VPN."
"WildFire has been instrumental in blocking a number of new threats, before common desktop anti-virus tools were able to detect them."
"Intuitive threat prevention and analysis solution, with a machine learning feature. Scalable, stable, and protects against zero-day threats."
"The solution is scalable."
"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."
"It catches modified signatures of known viruses."
"Its filtering is sometimes too precise or strict. We sometimes have to bypass and authorize some of the sites, but they get blocked. We know that they are trusted sites, but they are blocked, and we don't know why."
"Backup can be improved."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"The support system could be improved."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"I would like to see different graphs available in the reporting."
"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."
"Could be simplified for new users."
"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."
"My only observation is about the quality of the IPSec logs, which are difficult to interpret and are poor in filters."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I don't think it needs to improve anything, except maybe the speed to deploy the changes."
"The global product feature needs improvement, the VPN, and we need some enhanced features."
"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."
"Our main concern is that everything has to be synced with the WildFire Cloud and has to be checked through the subscription."
"The cyber security visibility and forensics features to receive more information about incidents could improve in Palo Alto Networks WildFire."
"Other vendors have some sort of bandwidth management built into the firewall itself and Palo Alto is missing that."
"They should make their user interface a little more user-friendly."
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, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox and Microsoft Defender for Office 365.
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