We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and WatchGuard XTM [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."We were looking for the VPN feature and controlling the inflow and outflow of all the traffic within the site and across the sites. We are also using it for the VPN and VLANs."
"The product offers very good security."
"It's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"Whenever we raise a complaint with FortiGate, their response and resolution times are minimal."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"The initial setup was simple and fast."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"The interface is straightforward and easy to use."
"It is a better firewall than others and it has better features."
"It works. I put pfSense in, and it works. I can't think of any trouble I ever had with it. It runs on heat-sensitive appliances. They don't need a fan, so they don't overheat. It is affordable, fast, and very high-speed. It is built on BSD Unix, and it pretty much runs on any Intel processor."
"We can run it on any hardware."
"pfSense allows us to spread the hours of connection and do the filtering on the pfSense site."
"There is a site-to-site VPN configuration between others people."
"They have a reporting system which can store data over a very long period of time. Not many other firewall vendors provide a reporting system, but if they do, like Fortinet does, then you've got buy that as an additional product and that can be more than twice as expensive as the initial investment in the firewall. And without reporting over a long-term period, you're just about wasting your time."
"Reputation Enabled Defense indicates that some websites are so infested that it's not even worth visiting them, and therefore saving the bandwidth of going through the detection process."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"WatchGuard XTM is fairly basic. We use it as the perimeter firewall. The main point is to protect from attack software and hacking."
"Monitoring of network activity is included in the box."
"I like the hostwatch because I can see what traffic uses the most bandwidth and I can block that site."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"The improvement is related to logs. Instead of the CLI, we should be able to have more insights into the logs of the firewall in the GUI."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"Fortinet doesn't provide multiple virtual firewalls which would facilitate end users and customers."
"It needs to improve its ISP load balancing."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"The routing capability on the FortiGate devices has room for improvement."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"It is not centrally managed, where you log into the website and can see all your services there. We would like to be able to see is all the configurations from a central interface on all our pfSenses."
"The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult."
"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."
"There is more demand for UTMs than a simple firewall. pfSense should support real-time features for handling the latest viruses and threats. It should support real-time checks and real-time status of threats. Some other vendors, such as Fortinet, already offer this type of capability. Such capability will be good for bringing pfSense at the same level as other solutions."
"There are several levels of firewall configuration such as beginner, advanced, and expert configurations. At each level, it becomes more complex and more tricky to set up the firewall. For example, if you want to install the firewall on your computer system, it would be a lot easier if it just tells you that this is the internet NIC and this is the Wi-Fi NIC."
"They can improve the dynamic of the input of IPs from outside."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"The VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
"The initial setup is neither simple nor complex. If you know the base in networking and how the firewall works, you will be able to figure it out."
"The setting policies need improvement. It needs an easier way to do static NAT and check on what policy is being used for that specific traffic."
"One huge issue with WatchGuard XTM is that I'm not getting reports in a readable format. Readable means, I don't want Excel online. We repeat auditing when we trigger the report or setup calendar. That functionality is what we are looking for from WatchGuard XTM here."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
"WatchGuard doesn't have a product that allows them to get into the data center. And that's just because there is no hardware to do the job. The software could do it, but there's no hardware that allows that to happen at the moment. So it doesn't scale as well as some other products, that's for sure."
"I would like them to improve the product's overall protections. This would be good for all product users."
Earn 20 points
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while WatchGuard XTM [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Firewalls. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while WatchGuard XTM [EOL] is rated 8.0. 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 WatchGuard XTM [EOL] writes "The multi-layer security of the products are the primary reason we use these appliances, however, the gateway wireless functionality for managing access points leaves much to be desired". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas WatchGuard XTM [EOL] is most compared with .
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