Hillstone E-Series Competitors and Alternatives

What do you think of Fortinet FortiGate?

We're discussing a family of UTM (Unified Threat Management) appliances.  FortiGate is a term which includes a wide range of products, starting with small ones dedicated to small offices, and developing into devices which are able to grant security and networking for large companies. The family includes physical devices and virtual machines, which grant network security on different layers using a single point of control. FortiGate is optimized to avoid bottlenecks or delays while the various controls are performed. High availability is also part of the available features with various solutions to avoid single points of failure.  In the following short list, I will list some interesting points about the FortiGate solution.  1. Administrative Interface If you are...

What do you think of Cisco ASA?

Cisco ASA has better application granularity, a more flexible means of policy creation, and easier to use controls and more powerful reports than its predecessors. We tested the ASA-5525-X in January 2013 and found a much improved user interface and lots of content-aware features.

What do you think of pfSense?

Primary Use Case Primary we use it for bandwidth limiting and load balancing our ISPs. And Pfsense excels doing that.  • Improvements to My Organization We had two ISPs, and still our Internet connection was awful. By installing pfSense and configuring load balancing and limiting bandwidth, we now have a reliable and stable connection. • Valuable Features Routing, load balancing, Traffic Limiter and queues. Since this company relies on an Internet connection, having these features is a must. • Room for Improvement Reporting and real-time monitoring, since I'm used to Watchguard's reporting features, it would be nice to have an embedded solution for reporting.  • Stability Issues Close to none. One time, while upgrading, the system crashed and had to install from...

What do you think of Meraki MX Firewalls?

I was using the Meraki MX Firewall with a complete Meraki set up (WAPs over 43 acres) and, in general, it was a really lovely system to administer.  We had a problem with our MX100 and Meraki sent us a spare the next day so we'd have it on hand in case of issues - we did end up doing a swap to check if this solved the problem. The swap took less than an hour to have it up and running. Meraki products are great for swapping in and out and generally administering. I don't think you need to have much training to deal with most Meraki appliances - the user interface is very easy to sort. It's cloud based and I never had problems accessing it. I've taken some screenshots from the Meraki PDF on the MX100. This gives you an idea of the kind of thing you're going to see in...