We performed a comparison between OPNsense and WatchGuard Firebox 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."Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The solution is very easy to understand. It's not overly complex."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"The IPS is good. It protect my network from attackers."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"The most important features of Fortinet FortiGate are the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and firewall control applications."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"OPNsense is easy to use and open source."
"I have found the solution has some great features overall, such as guest access capabilities, dashboards, and ease of use. There is plenty of documentation and support and it has the plugins that I needed."
"The most valuable feature is the Dual WAN in OPNSense, which offers advanced capabilities."
"What I like best about OPNsense is that, as a firewall, it's pretty good. I'm quite impressed with it. I had an excellent experience with OPNsense, which helped me achieve the targets I wanted."
"It has firewall and VPN capabilities, which are very valuable features."
"The interface and the dashboard are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The most valuable features are reporting, the Sensei plugin, and firewall capabilities."
"We have been operating here in our lab for several months, and everything appears to be extremely stable."
"From my experience with their customer service team, I would say that they seem quite knowledgeable and fairly quick to respond."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the dashboard."
"The security that is used for defending from the attacks is very good."
"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."
"HostWatch makes it so I can see, in real-time, activity in the event that there is something weird happening on the network. This simplifies my job."
"The set up of the VPN is pretty straightforward. Being able to build VPNs on the fly for certain users, if need be, is also valuable."
"Among the most valuable features is the ease of use — love the interface — of both the web interface and of the WatchGuard System Manager."
"Management and visibility are the most valuable features."
"It needs more available central management."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"WAN load-balancing could be a lot better at detecting when a link is poor or inconsistent, and not just flat out dead."
"The support we receive when we need to upgrade is not satisfactory and has room for improvement."
"The performance could be a bit better. Right now, I find it to be lacking. Having good performance is very important for our work."
"I think that the infrastructure for the VPN could be improved. The way that it is bundled also made it difficult to use and sell as it is too expensive."
"Stability and technical support are the two major issues I have found with Fortinet."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"The solution would not be suitable for anything large-scale."
"An area for improvement in OPNsense is the hardware, which needs to be updated more frequently. DNS blocking is another good feature I want to be added to the solution. pfSense has a peer-blocking feature that I also want to see in OPNsense."
"Given that OPNsense plays a pivotal role as a firewall, safeguarding against various threats, having a reliable backup ensures uninterrupted protection even if unforeseen events impact the primary virtual machine."
"The reporting part could be better."
"I would like better documentation concerning the provided packages and their integration."
"The logging could improve in OPNsense."
"While they do have paid options that actually gives better features, for most of the clients, if they tend to take a paid option will instead opt for Fortinet."
"You will need additional training before you can actually start to use it."
"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 pricing could be improved. It is definitely one of the more expensive products."
"What could use some significant improvement in WatchGuard Firebox would be its interface and policy management. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of WatchGuard Firebox is the ability to modify an existing policy instead of having to recreate a policy when changes are necessary. At the moment, there's no possibility to modify the policy. You have to delete the policy and recreate it."
"We would like to see granular notification settings and more advanced filtering in traffic monitoring."
"They are working on cloud-based options. However, they do not have the options fully functional in their solution at this time."
"The solution is lacking a professional website, they should be updated more often."
"There is room for improvement on the education side, regarding what does what, rather than just throwing it at a person and assuming they know everything about it. A lot of times, you have to call WatchGuard support to get the solution that will work, rather than their just having it published so that you can fix the problem on your own."
"There is room for improvement in the threat protection, data packet inspection, and performance of the solution. Generally, it's just a lower-end product. It does the job but doesn't do it very well."
OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. OPNsense is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our OPNsense vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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