We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and pfSense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: pfSense comes out on top in this comparison. It is high performing and, according to reviews, it is a more comprehensive solution than Azure Firewall. pfSense also received higher marks in the support category.
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The Fortinet FortiGate local partners were good. I did not have direct contact with Fortinet support."
"The features that we have found most valuable are the SSL VPN and the User Portal."
"It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall."
"The initial setup is straightforward; Azure Firewall does not have a complex implementation process. It is very simple; you just need to enable the service within Azure. It does not require any maintenance because it is managed by Microsoft, that is, it is a fully managed service."
"I think that one of the best features is definitely the premium version, along with the IDPs in terms of the intrusion detection and prevention system."
"It's helped us improve our security posture."
"The solution can autoscale."
"Azure's cost-effectiveness is its major advantage."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is the control over the network permissions and the network."
"Azure Firewall is a cloud-native solution that removes the pain of load balancers."
"The Layer four features are okay and meet my business needs."
"Centralized administration with multiple services, which allows for execution in several important functionalities of information security."
"The classic features such as content inspection, content protection, and the application-level firewall, are the most important."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and the capture photo."
"pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home."
"The solution has good customization abilities and plenty of features."
"The product’s documentation is good."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"The initial setup was straightforward, therefore I wanted to continue using the product."
"They need to improve their technical support."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"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."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"Some configuration elements cannot be easily altered once created."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"It would be nice to be able to create groupings for servers and offer groups of IP addresses."
"For larger enterprises, they need to adjust the scalability."
"There are a number of things that need to be simplified, but it's mostly costs. It needs to be simplified because it's pretty expensive."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"Right now, with Azure Firewall, we cannot have a normal inbound traffic flow. For inbound, Microsoft suggests using application gateways, so the options are very limited. I cannot use this firewall as an intermediate firewall because of the limitations, and I cannot point routing to another firewall. So if I want to use back-to-back firewall architecture in my environment, I cannot use Azure Firewall for that type of configuration either."
"The solution lacks artificial intelligence and machine learning. It might be in the roadmap. However, currently, it's not available."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"The solution should incorporate features similar to competitors like split tunneling."
"I would like to see pfSense integrate WireGuard. Currently, pfSense uses OpenVPN, and there's nothing wrong with it, but WireGuard is a lot leaner and meaner."
"I believe improving integration with various antivirus vendors could be beneficial."
"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."
"Also, simplifying the rules for the GeoIP. Making it simpler to understand would be an improvement."
"The Netgate forums and community don’t provide extensive discussions and topics related to every pfSense service."
"There are some bias issues and some intrusions in our network that have to be addressed. So, we're thinking of changing this firewall to something like a professional hardware-enabled firewall."
"I've never tried it in large environments. All my clients are small businesses with a handful of employees, so I am not sure how it works in large environments. I keep up with recent versions, and there's nothing I'm waiting for, and nothing breaks when I get a new version."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Azure Front Door, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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.
