We performed a comparison between Cisco IOS Security and Netgate pfSense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the rules and quality of service."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"The next-generation firewall is great."
"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."
"The capabilities for scalability with this product are huge"
"Cisco IOS allows us to keep the same security features as our principal offices."
"The security is very good."
"Cisco Technical Assistance Center works on a follow-the-sun concept and gives real 24x7 customer support, which is a great advantage when you have a service contract with them."
"Cisco IOS Security is very robust and works very well."
"One of the main features is that the hardware is extremely reliable."
"The most valuable features of Cisco IOS Security are the plenty of functionality it provides, many people are IT certified the usage, and the user interface is good."
"We are able to filter a lot of traffic especially when a lot of the traffic is in layer 7."
"It is a good firewall with good performance."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"Firewall system for small, medium, and large data networks. It allows you to provide security to your environment: DMZ networks, LAN, WAN, etc."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"Good basic firewall features."
"The concurrent users are perfect for us."
"I mostly like all of it. Whatever we use is valuable."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"I haven't had a single issue since using Fortinet."
"The logging details need to be improved."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"Fortinet Fortigate could benefit by simplifying some of their processes."
"It would be ideal if the solution had more capacity."
"We have a very bad experience on the support. They take too much time requesting logs, and they are not coming directly online to resolve the issues."
"With respect to user-friendliness, it is a command-line interface and those with such experience will get along just fine, whereas others may struggle."
"Most of their features are meant for Cisco. You cannot integrate them with any other vendor."
"Cisco very slowly introduces and implements the products, unlike other brands."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see support for the 100BT and 7000 models."
"There are the usual bugs that are inherent to some software upgrades. Sometimes this provides some unexpected issues, however, it happens with all brands all the time."
"Cisco is a scalable product, but it is expensive compared to other vendors."
"Reporting and real-time monitoring, since I'm used to Watchguard's reporting features, it would be nice to have an embedded solution for reporting."
"It would be great to add more to security."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"If a user doesn't have a large amount of experience in Linux systems, they will have problems using this solution. Users need to be highly skilled in troubleshooting competency. Users who do not have such skills will find the product difficult to use."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"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."
"Web interface could be enhanced and more user friendly."
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco IOS Security writes "User-friendly and excels in documentation, making it easier to resolve issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Meraki MX, Fortinet FortiOS, OPNsense and Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering with PAN-DB, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Cisco IOS Security vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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