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."The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable."
"It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value."
"The product has valuable features for business intelligence."
"The product's stability is good."
"Completely integrates branch offices with perimeter security."
"The solution is very user-friendly and easy to deal with."
"Previously, anyone in the organization would see any data point in the wall. They could just go and connect their machine with that data point and could access the network. But now, even if someone came and tried that, they will not be given access."
"Cisco IOS Security increases the overall security of our network, performs authentication, and provides level 15 access and privileges."
"Technical support for this solution is very good."
"I'm able to transfer data over internet network security. With the GRE I'm able to transfer data within one bunch to another bunch in a public way, like the internet. The communication is encrypted and is private. It gives me added privacy."
"The GUI is easy to understand."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"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 use pfSense because it gives me the flexibility to greatly expand basic firewall features."
"My technicians find the pfSense's web interface very useful. It is very easy to use. pfSense is very reliable and stable. We like the OpenVPN clients that can be deployed using pfSense very much."
"It is a very good solution for enterprises that need a VPN for their employees. It is the best way to provide a remote work facility to employees at a very low cost. Other solutions that I have had in the past were very expensive. Enterprises don't always have that kind of money to invest."
"One of the advantages of pfSense is that it is very easy to work with. It is a very good open-source solution, and it works really well. pfSense provides a complete package. For some features, it could be the first solution in the world. It is a very good alternative in the market for a firewall solution. You don't need to go to Cisco or other brands with expensive firewalls. pfSense also allows us to offer some support services."
"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."
"Cisco Meraki products are rising very quickly in the cloud and the connected era. Meraki products offer much better ROI, upgradability, and manageability."
"It is stable, but its stability can be improved."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"With the addition of some features, it is possible that FortiGate can be used in all verticals."
"The biggest "gotcha" is that if the client purchases what they call the UTM shared bundle, which has unified threat management on both, it's not as easy to manage if you have more than one firewall."
"It takes too much time to deploy a policy to FMC. It takes around eight minutes. You can't afford any downtime when you're changing policies."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"We need to pay for the license and it is expensive."
"We cannot directly upgrade the system. The tool's deployment is also very difficult in legacy environments. The tool needs to have bigger ports as well."
"There could be a bit more functions on offer that could make it easier to use."
"The graphical user interface or the GUI could be better. Beginners can use some devices with the GUI, but some security devices are configured using CLI. It would also be better if it had its own Intrusion Protection Service and Intrusion Detection Service on the server."
"There's a technology called SD-WAN that we would like to see. We are unable to handle multiple connections or to automatically load balance. I would like to have a feature that enables us to automatically prepare for load balancing."
"An area for improvement in Cisco IOS Security is the performance because it's not as stable sometimes. There's also some latency in the solution, which could be improved. Cisco IOS Security integrates with other solutions, but you'll encounter many errors after integration, so this is another area for improvement. I'd like to see enhanced performance and a simplified setup in the next version of Cisco IOS Security."
"The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"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."
"Could be simplified for new users."
"I would like to see SD1 integration into the software. That would be fantastic."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"The router monitoring needs improvement when compared with Sonicwall."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 23rd in Firewalls with 46 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 "A mature product with good integration capabilities, however, it needs to be more affordable". 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 NG Firewalls, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, Cisco Secure Firewall and KerioControl. See our Cisco IOS Security vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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