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."Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use. Anyone can easily maintain it."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"We use a lot of function on the IPS and it works well for us."
"Centralized monitoring, policy management, and virtualized appliances allow us to take control over our public and private infrastructure."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiOS are the SD-WAN, SSL inspection, and IDS/IPS functions."
"Performance-wise, I think FortiOS is much better than its Juniper counterpart. Based on our actual experience and performance metrics, FortiOS-based products are much better than Juniper."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiOS are the ease of use and user-friendly interface."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiOS network segregation, UTM, and antivirus, freight management protection, such as DDoS. Additionally, the CLI and the GUI are easy to use. The architecture makes sense, and the command in the CLI are organized well. They have quite a lot of features are easy to use, and are user-friendly. Any novice can use Fortinet FortiOS without an issue."
"There are many useful features, such as web security and advanced threat detection."
"The most important features of Fortinet FortiOS are the ability to block and make white and black lists. Additionally, the filtering of user access to websites is useful."
"There are a lot of features that we like within the solution. The resources or performance of the firewall is very good. However, the real selling point is the fact that the solution offers so many features, it gives our clients a lot of extras that they can work with. There's a lot on offer."
"Fortinet FortiOS's valuable features include intuitive policy creation and deployment, precise parameter settings to determine thresholds, and security profiles such as web filtering and remote application filtering, among others."
"pfSense allows us to spread the hours of connection and do the filtering on the pfSense site."
"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."
"It is easy to use and has integrity with other systems, such as proxies and quality of service."
"The intrusion detection feature is the most valuable. It is an open-source firewall, so there is a lot of material on it. I also find the open VPN capability very nice. It is pretty customizable. The clustering and the high availability are the two biggest things to be able to get out of a firewall."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"I like the connectivity to the open VPN. It's very smooth."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"The web-cache feature which was previously on the FortiGate device, but was deleted with the recent upgrade should be returned. It was a very valuable feature for us."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"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."
"The customization could be improved. Cisco, for example, is much better at this. They need to work to be at least as good as they are."
"While it is a solid solution, there are some product limitations which exclude it from deployment in some situations."
"There is some room for improvement in the support."
"Fortinet FortiOS can improve by limiting the need for the CLI and GUI combination. The more functions they can have on the GUI and less on CLI would be helpful."
"The solution is good, but they have poor marketing in Nigeria. They need to market their product better."
"The threat time interval lags a little, especially if there's a heavy load on the firewall."
"Right now, we have to contend with CLI. We'd like it to be easier. We need the features to be in a UI."
"I would like to see the features of FortiAnalyzer included in Fortinet FortiOS. Right now, you're required to have an additional license and a different device for features such as processing the log, reporting, and analyzing traffic."
"There are some issues with the performance. We also had some issues while updating the firmware."
"It would be great to add more to security."
"Other solutions provide more scope for growth. For instance, we can have only 10 to 20 employees on VPN, but other solutions can support more users. We also have more capabilities to increase the performance of the solution."
"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."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"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."
"More documentation would be great, especially on new features because sometimes, when new features come out, you don't get to understand them right off the bat. You have to really spend a lot of time understanding them. So, more documentation would be awesome."
"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."
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 FortiWeb, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and OPNsense, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Fortinet FortiOS vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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