We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiOS 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."The product offers very good security."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and the UI. It has always provided me with what I needed. I have no need for additional costs that other solutions have, such as Sophos."
"It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"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 performs very well."
"The initial setup is easy. It's the easiest firewall installation process on the market. I work with three or four other products and this one is the easiest."
"The stability of Fortinet meets our requirements and I'm satisfied with it."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiOS are user-friendliness, ease of use, and threat prevention."
"I like that the firewall gives me a lot of control in terms of outgoing and inbound traffic, and it scores better in deep packet inspections when compared with the Azure Firewall."
"All of the features in this solution are effective and efficient."
"The interface is good."
"It efficiently manages large-scale firewall deployments."
"The most valuable feature of this solution would be the caching feature."
"I have found the firewall portion for the blocking most valuable."
"At our peak time, we have reached more than 5,000 concurrent connections."
"The redundancy and scalability ARE very nice."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"Creation of certificates and the facility to administer services are valuable features."
"It has a good web cache. I used to use a DHCP server and DNS server. For my company, I use pfSense as a load balancing application."
"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."
"I like pfSense's reports and how I can control access to the policies on the firewall."
"Technical support for this solution can be improved."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"The Wi-Fi controller needs a lot of improvement."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"Lacks training for new features."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"The solution is very expensive."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"FortiOS could provide a more detailed analysis of the network and connected devices."
"The solution could improve by making the dashboard easier to use."
"The solution could improve the log retention and reports."
"The solution's graphic interface could be a bit more responsive and include notations when changes are made."
"There are some features for FortiGate using FortiOS that can only be enabled via a command line. These aren't very advanced features they have been part of FortiOS for quite some time but they still aren't accessible from the graphical user interface. It makes it a little bit harder than it should be for us to manage the solution. That's my main concern with the user interface. Another concern we have is some elements for the user interface, if they're not properly configured, it could lead to hardware and performance degradation."
"Fortinet's central management needs to be improved. FortiManager's technical tool provider ability should manage all Fortinet security products. Right now, FortiManager only manages the configuration of FortiGate."
"The additional features I would like to see included in the next release is better troubleshooting and reporting."
"There is no flexibility."
"The hotspot and the portal feature in this solution are not stable for WiFi access. We use it at least once or twice every day and it crashes. Some modules can be better by improving detection and having new updates. Additionally, we have some issues with clustering and load balancing that could improve."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"When I checked other packages, it seems they use different tools that are installed on the PSS for functionality. They rely on third-party tools, unlike Fortinet, for example, which has its own tools. In comparison, we also use third-party tools on pfSense. For example, we had a situation where we needed a tool to identify authorized users, and when I searched for a solution, I found a third-party tool. However, using such tools may come with additional costs."
"Improve analysis of logs and dashboards (control panel) with improved alert functionality."
"It would be great to add more to security."
"It requires more attention to provide a better alternative for open source to small government or educational institutions with reduced budgets in terms of technology."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"The integration could be improved."
Fortinet FortiOS is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 73 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Fortinet FortiOS is rated 8.4, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiOS writes "Provides effective filtering features, good stability but initial setup is moderately challenging". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Fortinet FortiOS is most compared with Fortinet FortiManager, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Fortinet FortiWeb, Darktrace and OPNsense, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Fortinet FortiOS vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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