We performed a comparison between pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products received high marks from reviewers, but WatchGuard ultimately won out in this comparison. According to reviews, WatchGuard appears to be a more secure solution.
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"I really like the captive portal feature for our guest network. It has nice VLAN features in terms of separating our network. The anti-virus is also good."
"It can expand easily."
"The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"It's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"The user interface (UI) is very, very good."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"This solution has helped our organization by protecting our network from attacks."
"It is a good firewall with good performance."
"The initial setup was straightforward, therefore I wanted to continue using the product."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It's a good solution for end-users. It's pretty easy to work with."
"We can run it on any hardware."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"One of the most valuable features is the Geolocation. Because we aren't a multinational corporation, it allows me to look at things which might be suspicious to make sure that they are legitimate transactions rather than people sniffing around the network."
"Firebox operates effectively in the background, blocking potential threats without a need for constant monitoring."
"The most valuable feature for small and medium businesses is the support for various protocol proxies."
"The ease of use is most valuable. You can quickly train someone who hasn't seen a firewall in life. You can get people up to speed, and in a few months, they are able to manage this product very easily. It is a very user-friendly, scalable, and stable product. Its price is also spot-on."
"Their support is excellent, and the stability is very good."
"Two of the functionalities we use most are the traffic monitoring and the full panel dashboard. Those are two things that are very useful for us... In addition, it provides us with layered security. It allows us to determine what types of access, to which networks, we want to allow or deny."
"Simple to move settings between WatchGuard boxes."
"From my experience with their customer service team, I would say that they seem quite knowledgeable and fairly quick to respond."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"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."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"I would like Fortinet to add more automation to FortiGate."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"The reporting in Fortinet FortiGate could improve. Customers are having to purchase additional reporting components. When I have used the Sophos solution it is a complete solution, in Fortinet FortiGate you have to use additional tools to have the features needed."
"With the addition of some features, it is possible that FortiGate can be used in all verticals."
"pfSense could improve by having a sandboxing feature that I have seen in SonicWall. However, maybe it is available I am not aware of it."
"Layer 7 advanced firewall features are not included in the solution."
"User interface is a little clumsy."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
"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."
"The technical support needs to be improved."
"Needs services on additional features, such as managing inventory and generating reports."
"The product must provide integration with other solutions."
"We use WatchGuard to manage our failover for internet. If a primary internet goes down, it does a failover to the secondary the internet. However, what it doesn't do so well is that if the primary internet has a lot of latency but it's not completely down, it doesn't do a failover to the backup in a timely manner."
"In WatchGuard Firebox, the antivirus and malware detection systems are areas with shortcomings that require improvement since they are the most important elements of a cybersecurity tool."
"The documentation for the System Manager/Dimension configuration, could be a little bit clearer... The use case where you have multiple sites with multiple firewalls, and one site that has the System Manager server and the Dimension server, wasn't really well defined. It took me a little bit of digging to get that to actually work."
"The data loss protection works well, but it could be easier to configure. The complexity of data loss protection makes it a more difficult feature to fully leverage. Better integration with third-party, two-factor authentication would be advantageous."
"I would like to have a little more control over access points and the ability to see the bandwidth that is passing through a specific access point. We are not able to see that. We can see what traffic is passing through the Firebox itself, but we can't identify if it is coming from a particular access point or not."
"There should be better integration and a way to configure multiple vendors into the same data center in order to offer more flexibility."
"There is a slight learning curve."
"It would be wonderful if the WatchGuard team develops nice products for threat intelligence."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 79 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while WatchGuard Firebox 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 WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and SonicWall TZ, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors and 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.