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."Its stability is the most valuable."
"I like that they have given me a solution at a fair price."
"The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support."
"The simplicity of the product is great. It's very easy to use, which is a compliment we get all the time in terms of feedback."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"This solution has helped our organization by having strong functions and a reliable firewall."
"It's very easy to set up, it's very easy to make policies and, for an organization, that means you don't need IT expert in firewalls. You just need to have somebody who knows a little bit of IT, and that's it. With other products, you need someone with a "Masters" degree in firewalls."
"The most valuable features of pfSense are the reports, monitoring, filtration, and blocking incoming and outgoing traffic."
"The scalability is very good, where you can do an HA configuration and then bring in another box, if necessary."
"The most valuable feature, for instance, is the ease of migrating configurations between different Netgate devices housed in the same box."
"We like the fact that the product is open-source. It's free to use. There are no costs associated with it."
"The interface is straightforward and easy to use."
"We can run it on any hardware."
"This solution has increased the level of security, given us more control, provided a deep insight into network traffic, and is a great VPN solution."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"I like the hostwatch because I can see what traffic uses the most bandwidth and I can block that site."
"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."
"There is a site-to-site VPN configuration between others people."
"Monitoring of network activity is included in the box."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"It configures in all-in-one place."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"WatchGuard XTM is fairly basic. We use it as the perimeter firewall. The main point is to protect from attack software and hacking."
"The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility."
"The scalability could be better."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"With the addition of some features, it is possible that FortiGate can be used in all verticals."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having better visibility. Palo Alto has better visibility."
"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."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"This solution is good for small businesses but it is not as stable as other competitors such as Fortinet."
"The Netgate forums and community don’t provide extensive discussions and topics related to every pfSense service."
"The security could be improved."
"There's a bit of a learning curve during the initial implementation."
"They could improve their commercial stance and be more agile when it comes to the commercial pricing of enterprise deals."
"I would like to see multiple DNS servers running on individual interfaces."
"The product must provide integration with other solutions."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"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."
"The VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
"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."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
"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."
"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."
"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)."
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 .
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.