We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Smoothwall Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."User-friendly and affordable security solution that's recommended for SMB customers. This solution has good technical support."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"Our project needs to link two sides through the internet. One of these was in Cairo and the other in another city. We used FortiGate as the integrating solution between the two locations, i.e. the Fortinet 30E & 100E."
"FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value."
"Its reliability and cost-effectiveness stand out."
"The main features of this solution are customization and ease to use."
"The product’s documentation is good."
"Creation of certificates and the facility to administer services are valuable features."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"The initial setup was straightforward, therefore I wanted to continue using the product."
"Great extensibility of the platform."
"The redundancy and scalability ARE very nice."
"It was easy to initially deploy it."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"Backup can be improved."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"I have to say that the initial setup was complex. The deployment took a few days to get set up. Initially, we were using an IPVanish. We switched to this tool since we thought it would be easier. But it turns out it wasn't easier to set up and run."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"In the next release, maybe the documentation on how to use this solution could be improved."
"As far as wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you."
"They can improve the dynamic of the input of IPs from outside."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"The security could be improved."
"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."
"It needs to be more secure."
"Lacks instructional videos."
"Many people have problems setting up the web cache for the web system."
"Layer 7 advanced firewall features are not included in the solution."
"There is room for improvement in the UI. They can improve it by making it so that everything is in one place, so we don't have to jump around to different pages."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Smoothwall Firewall is ranked 34th in Firewalls with 1 review. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Smoothwall Firewall is rated 9.0. 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 Smoothwall Firewall writes "Offers good scalability and monitoring features ". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Smoothwall Firewall is most compared with OPNsense.
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