We performed a comparison between KerioControl 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."The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"Fortigate's most valuable feature is that it doesn't need a push policy when writing rules."
"Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"There is an easy process for configuring it, and it is straightforward to implement the device from scratch."
"Fortigate represents a really scalable way of delivering perimeter network security, some level of layer 7 security, WAF, and also a way to create a meshed ADVPN solution."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"The product is easy to use."
"The firewall and the content filtering options are valuable."
"I like intrusion detection and prevention and bandwidth management. The routing part is also awesome. It is a good firewall. We never had a major breach from outside. We've never been impacted by ransomware, and our systems have never been infiltrated."
"The ease of use in the GUI itself is the most valuable feature. The GUI is really the best part of it. We like the traffic rules so we can control who can get to what. It's easy to determine the flow of the traffic itself so we aren't having to guess through command lines and reading out basically command-driven output. It's just a very easy-to-use interface. The interface is the best part of the product."
"The most valuable feature is to provide users with the ability to log in to the portal page, keep track of their data usage and perform bandwidth management."
"Kerio has improved my organization's security."
"What I like the most about Kerio is that I can use the software appliance as a solution, so if the hardware fails for any reason then I can quickly replace it with hardware that I have in stock."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the dashboard."
"It's pretty simple to use. It's pretty simple to understand, and there's plenty of documentation. It does a pretty good job of what it is meant to do."
"The most valuable feature is the GUI, especially the real-time bandwidth usage report. Also, its integration with WiFi access points is nice."
"Simple to move settings between WatchGuard boxes."
"The ease of use is most valuable. You can quickly train someone who hasn't seen a firewall in life. You can get people up to speed, and in a few months, they are able to manage this product very easily. It is a very user-friendly, scalable, and stable product. Its price is also spot-on."
"WatchGuard Firebox is easy to configure and has a nice user interface."
"It's hard to pick one feature over another. But if I had to pick one, the UTM would be the most valuable because of the notification. I get notified via email if there is any type of threat detection or alert, telling me something is wrong."
"It has everything we need in terms of functionality."
"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"From a reporting perspective, there's room for improvement. They're providing FortiAnalyzer through which one can get some enhancements, but the visibility and reporting still need slight improvement."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"We have an issue with hotel guest vouchers."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"I don't really have anything negative to say as far as Fortinet firewalls are concerned. If anything, they can support a user a little bit better. They can stop being so time-sensitive about how much time the support call has taken, and they can help you do it yourself."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"One area that confused me a bit when I was building my current network. I use VLANs to have separate functionality on the network, and the appliance I got was the WiFi model, but I discovered that you can't assign WiFi channels to the VLAN. So, you can have WiFi, but its own subnet. You can't run that over the VLAN. Effectively, I can't use the WiFi facility in the appliance and had to purchase a separate web that supports VLANs. In the end, I had to go to GFI support. They confirmed this is just a limited functionality of that device, as it is a low-end device. I don't know if any of their high-end models have a better facility or not."
"If you have to dive deeper into the firewall or any other features, then you really have to read up a bit about how to set it up properly. Some of my colleagues, in the beginning, jumped in and made a bunch of rules but then it got really messy. If Kerio had a template or guidelines for best practices, at the beginning, that would really help. With Kerio Control it's basically 'find out for yourself.'"
"They should improve the remote connectivity feature for users."
"After the takeover by GFI, one of the things that Kerio built was MyKerio environment. This has not been very reliable because I get many messages that MyKerio is not functioning. For some reason, there are things that they changed and it is not very reliable at this moment, instead I have to connect to the firewall to see what is happening."
"I would like to be able to automatically send email from Kerio Control and have it tell me what my external IPs are, because on one of my lines I have a fixed IP address and on the other it is variable. If there were a permanent way for me to figure out, "Okay, my current external VPN and my firm IP is this," it would help. I need to know the IP address to connect with the VPN and, at the moment, one of the lines sometimes changes its IP address without me knowing it. It's a hassle to figure out what it is."
"The antivirus seemed to be a bit laggy on the connection so I disconnected that. It's definitely good. The only issue we've had with any sort of cyber attack seemed to be coming from a couple of distinct locations, people trying to get into known ports on remote desktops and stuff like that. The fact that we can block all that traffic is just great. It simplifies it."
"The overall speed needs improvement. Internet connectivity speed needs to be improved somehow."
"KerioControl should add more options in VPN features, such as IPsec VPNs, SSL VPNs, and L2TP VPNs, because KerioControl uses a special VPN for their products."
"I'd like to have better access to workstation monitoring, connection monitoring, and the amount of time an address is being used, to better gauge proper network utilization. If I knew that something was connected to a particular external location for an extended period that seems abnormal, I'd be able to act upon it."
"It would be wonderful if the WatchGuard team develops nice products for threat intelligence."
"Sometimes I would like to copy a rule set from one box to another box in a direct way. This is a feature that is not present at the moment in WatchGuard."
"This solution needs the option to add an external hard drive."
"Due to their lack of investment in marketing, channel development, and certifications, WatchGuard faces challenges in gaining visibility and market share, especially in regions like Pakistan."
"The performance of the solution's processor needs to be faster."
"We were able to take from an older configuration, build a new one quickly, and get it up and running, which didn't take long, but there was some pain around it."
"Reporting is something you've got to set up separately. It's one of those things that you've got to put some time into. One of the options is to set up a local report server, which is what I did. It's not great. It's okay... Some of the stuff is a little complicated to get up and running. Once you do, it becomes very user-friendly and easy to work with, but I find there are some implementation headaches with some of their stuff."
KerioControl is ranked 28th in Firewalls with 54 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. KerioControl is rated 8.0, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of KerioControl writes "With VPN, any of our guys can log in to the system and effectively be on board; helps with our customers all over the world". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". KerioControl is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG and Splunk User Behavior Analytics, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Meraki MX. See our KerioControl vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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