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.
"Secure, user-friendly, stable, and scalable network security solution. Installation is straightforward."
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"We are a visual effects company, and there have been a number of high profile security issues in our industry. This has brought us to a higher standard of security, which our clients are very keen on these days."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"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."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"It is a good source for firewall protection."
"A very stable product that lasts over time, easy to understand, and administer."
"The redundancy and scalability ARE very nice."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"I am happy with the EPLS, the radius, and I am happy with the captive portal."
"It works. I put pfSense in, and it works. I can't think of any trouble I ever had with it. It runs on heat-sensitive appliances. They don't need a fan, so they don't overheat. It is affordable, fast, and very high-speed. It is built on BSD Unix, and it pretty much runs on any Intel processor."
"It has a very nice web interface, and it is very simple to use. The way policies are working is also good."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and the capture photo."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"The security that is used for defending from the attacks is very good."
"The most valuable feature of WatchGuard Firebox is the VPN. It's easy to connect to the VPN."
"After conducting several tests I found the antivirus is working very well. Additionally, they have a very interesting feature, DNS WatchGuard, which is checking DNS requests for phishing, among other things, and it has caught a lot of unwanted attempts and attacks."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use of the interface."
"WebBlocker has the best URL category database ever."
"Their support is excellent, and the stability is very good."
"I could still keep the data rates really high, up near the two gigahertz data speeds, without compromise on the security perimeters being acted simultaneously."
"I like the High Availability features of the newest ones I'm using because they allow a firewall to fail and still be up and running."
"Security is a continuous process. In every product, there is a requirement for improvement. Its pricing should also be improved according to Indian market requirements. They must also improve on the reporting part. Its reporting can be more precise. If we can get a real-time report in a specific format, it will be helpful for customers to know about the current status of their security."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Layer 7 advanced firewall features are not included in the solution."
"Needs services on additional features, such as managing inventory and generating reports."
"If you want to take advantage of all of the solution's options, you need to have a bit of a technical background. It's not for a layperson."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"The interface is not very shiny and attractive."
"Improve analysis of logs and dashboards (control panel) with improved alert functionality."
"Also, the GUI is helpful, but it's not user-friendly. It's complicated. It should be more intuitive for the average user and have an excellent graphical view. Of course, the user will typically know about network administration, but it still should be easy to understand."
"As an open-source solution, there are so many loopholes happening within the product. By design, no one is taking ownership of it, and that is worrisome to me."
"The solution needs to improve its accessibility."
"The user interface for WatchGuard Firebox has room for improvement. Right now, it's a bit complex to work with and could be easier."
"We would like to see granular notification settings and more advanced filtering in traffic monitoring."
"In terms of the reporting and management features — and this isn't necessarily a WatchGuard issue, this seems to be more of an industry-wide issue — you get reports, but a lot of times you don't know what you're looking at. You're so overwhelmed with the data. You're getting a lot of stuff that doesn't matter, so it takes time to parse through it, to actually get what you want to know."
"The level of support from WatchGuard is not as good."
"There could also be better reporting. For example, there should be more out-of-the-box management reports."
"The performance of the solution's processor needs to be faster."
"WatchGuard Firebox could improve the speed of updates, such as new features or improvements. However, they are frequently improving the solution in many areas, such as geo-locations, definitions, and web blocking."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.6. 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.
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