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."It is a safe product."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"It is a good source for firewall protection."
"Its performance in fulfilling our requirements has been satisfactory."
"The next-generation firewall is great."
"What I like the most is the configuration and that it's simple, and straightforward to maintain."
"The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"The documentation is very good."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"The solution is very easy to use and configure."
"It has a very nice web interface, and it is very simple to use. The way policies are working is also good."
"I am happy with the EPLS, the radius, and I am happy with the captive portal."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"The built-in open VPN and the VPN Client Export are the solution's most valuable aspects."
"There is a site-to-site VPN configuration between others people."
"We have used technical support for WatchGuard many times and overall, we are satisfied with it. They are always listening and there is a good reaction time to our findings. When there are issues, they really try to resolve them."
"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."
"Application Control is fantastic with over 2,500 applications and the granularity that we can either allow people to view but not be able to log on to Facebook; or view it and log onto it if they're in the marketing department, but not play Facebook games. There are all sorts of different options like that. So it's highly granular."
"I like the hostwatch because I can see what traffic uses the most bandwidth and I can block that site."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"It configures in all-in-one place."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve the integration with Active Directory. Additionally, I would like to have a Cloud Controller, such as they do in the Cisco Meraki solution."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it."
"Lacks training for new features."
"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."
"User interface is a little clumsy."
"The Netgate forums and community don’t provide extensive discussions and topics related to every pfSense service."
"As an open-source solution, there are so many loopholes happening within the product. By design, no one is taking ownership of it, and that is worrisome to me."
"The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"The stability could be improved."
"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."
"I would like them to improve the product's overall protections. This would be good for all product users."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
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, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas WatchGuard XTM [EOL] is most compared with .
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