The other real experience I've had is with Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, and WatchGuard. 

The Cisco was more complicated and people didn't really like it because it was a more complicated interface or it seemed more complicated for them.

The WatchGuard and, from what I saw, the Palo Alto are good firewalls; some would say better as firewalls than Kerio. But they don't have all the other features and they didn't seem as easy. They may have more specific options you could set in the actual firewall rules; you could drill it down a bit further. But my experience has been pretty limited, so it might have just been that they looked like they did more, but in fact they just looked more complicated and only gave the impression they would do more. But these devices didn't have all the features of Kerio like the users, the groups, domain logins, bandwidth management, and content filters. They were just firewalls.

Generally, our customers are all small to medium, if you were to compare them with a typical business. They're not "enterprise" technically, even though they do run a lot of enterprise hardware, like full Cisco networks, etc. They just don't really have the same configuration. They've got the budget, but they just don't always want to spend it. I think Kerio could work in an enterprise. A lot of the time, it depends on who is running the security and what they prefer and what is approved by any governing bodies.

Kerio seems to have a reputation, for some people, not to be a true firewall. It's just a feeling that people get, but that's biased towards what they prefer to work with.

On the same price point, you can't compare them. If you're looking at a Kerio box that might be £3,000 a box plus a year's license every year, versus our £100,000 security system, you can't really compare them. But for devices and hardware/software in the same price range, I wouldn't knock it back for something else.

We have also worked with Cisco, FORTRESS, and Juniper. One of the main reasons that we're using Kerio is that the interface is really simple to handle. It's really laid out well.

I don't like the Cisco interface. In the old days, we had to do everything manually via the console; type in all kinds of stuff. Now, you just want to click something.

We do evaluate other products both before we choose Kerio Control and on a regular bases. We do have one or two smaller firewall product that we use for the true entry-level businesses who don't need any capabilities, and we are constantly seeing products as we get new customers and what products they are using currently. We don't like to rip them out right away until we understand the network and its issues, we have to get familiar with a customer before we can make a recommendation.

Vendors are always coming out with new things and there are always new features. True cloud management seems to be the big buzz right now, so we've been looking at those type of products. However, so far we keep going back to Kerio Control.

A lot of times I can do things in one screen of Kerio Control that would take two to three screens. I was just making a firewall rule with NAT forwarding on a different product for a customer a couple of days ago and that took four different screens and four different menus. One of the nice things about Kerio is how it does firewall rules and port forwarding.You do it all-in-one screen called "rules" where It creates the forwarding, the NAT, and the port holes.  

With some products I'd have to go into a window to create a firewall rule of VLAN 1 to VLAN 2, then I have to create a firewall rule of VLAN 2 to VLAN 3. Finally, I have to create a firewall rule of VLAN 1 to VLAN 3. That's three separate firewall rules that I have to build. If I want to block one port, then that's three separate firewall rules I have to edit. On Kerio Control, the way it's setup, I can make one rule that encompasses all three of those rules by having my source have multiple sources, multiple destinations, and multiple ports. For example, a security camera system needs three ports forwarded to it. I might have to create three rules and 3 NAT translations, one for each of those ports. Some of them I can group, but others you can't. With Kerio firewall, I can list all those ports in one spot. Therefore, I can create a rule that allows the WAN and VPN 2 to access a camera system on VPN 3 on these two ports and point it all to the Camera System using only one rule.

It is not the most powerful firewall out there, I understand that, but it's a great balancing act between the capabilities. It's as capable as many of my other firewalls, but at the same time, it's not as complicated. You don't need to take a three-month course like you do with some of the other products in order to be able to use it properly. It's all GUI-based, unlike some products. Sure a lot of products have a GUI where you get just so much done, then at a certain point, you have to jump into command line. There is no command line option in Kerio Control because its not needed, there isn't a point where I have to pull out a manual and find obscure commands to type in to get the product to do something I want it to do.

We didn't really look into other solutions. We were using MikroTik routers to do some of the work, but not really. Rather than learn SonicWall, we just switched to Kerio, because we we're familiar with the interfacing.

Some of the main differences between the other solutions and Kerio is that Kerio has made their subscription service fairly universal. You get pretty much everything with one subscription. With some of the other vendors, you have to subscribe to each module that you want to use. On the other side of it, other firewall vendors tend to be able to handle in the millions of connections, hundreds of thousands to millions. And we see some of those limitations with the Kerio appliance because of some of the aging architecture of it.

I have used Cisco, FortiGate, pfSense, and then more simple router things that have integrated software. However, mostly in business, I don't want to use just a router with integrated software. I don't believe in that concept. My customers are of a size that the stability of the product and the way it is maintained are very important to me. That's one of the strongest things about Kerio Control. It has proven to me over the years, and with my customers as well, that it's a very stable product. I haven't seen another product that compares to it within its price range. However, I also have to help my customers when they are having problems when connecting to a site or when they are having problems in general. When I contact their IT to find out what's happening on their side, it is difficult to get an answer why things are going wrong.

I can't find a comparable product to Kerio Control that offers the same set of features for the same money.

I found another product that can do a lot more than Kerio Connect, and that's IceWarp. IceWarp is a very strong product. IceWarp is a really strong competitor within this market. I was impressed with the software's ease of use because it's completely web-based. It's not only a mail server product, which offers secure attachments with out-of-the-box Office, but offers two-factor authentication. It also has a web-based text editor and Excel sheet, where you can make a basic presentation. With the same interface, there is the possibility to do OneDrive or Google Drive. They built it with the same depth that you need to log in to your IceWarp environment as a user. You can store your documents and sync them with a Mac or Windows PC. However, there is not much to find about this product.

The comprehensiveness of the security features this solution provides is the reason why I have stuck with them for so long. It has all the features that I need, and I haven't had to go and buy separate products. However, there are competing products that have a lot of these features in them. I did toy with the SonicWall product for a little while. SonicWall, who is a subsidiary of Dell EMC, offered an appliance, but it didn't do the internal network DNS nor was it good at authentication. I think the Kerio products are more rounded for running a small network out of a single appliance and not needing other infrastructure. SonicWall was frustrating because it didn't have a lot of the features that Kerio had.

SonicWall was my first foray into appliances. Up until that point I had been using the Kerio Control software edition. I liked the idea of appliances. If you're running something on a PC, you need to have a PC running, along with fans and hard drives spinning. Your appliances, even though they're lower spec hardware, are small and quiet. At the time, SonicWall was a fair bit cheaper, but that was how I discovered it was a false economy. It just didn't have the pool of features in it that Kerio had, so I would have needed to have a number of work arounds.

Looking at Cisco's documentation, they look a bit more complex to set up than Kerio Control.

I haven't evaluated any other options. I started using Kerio Control and it was sufficient. I haven't spent any time looking at alternatives. I've seen constant improvements in Kerio; they actively enhance the product. That's a good sign for me. I also use the GFI mail server and I prefer to use one company for my tools.

We did look at and we're also an authorized Cisco reseller, but they're doing the same thing as SonicWall now. These big companies forget who puts all the work in. What they're trying to do, in my opinion, is get the little reseller to go out and hire the right people and go out and move their product, get them installed, and then they want to start going to them directly. I understand that smaller companies come and go but we've been here 37 years in total. They shouldn't go to our customers and start trying to direct sell to them and that type of thing. 

We were also a Dell reseller and we quit because we had to register every sale with them, and then they were going direct to the customers. It's not fair to the company that's gone out and done all the work.

Evaluating other solutions would be the responsibility of the CIO because everything that we do has to be agreed-upon on a standardized platform as we are the ones that are going to have to support it. We let any customers that we deal with that are possibly dealing with other brands know where our demarcation point of responsibility is because it's very much so once you touch it, you own it. If you go onto a boat and you touch one thing, you'll be getting a call for the next three weeks about it. It's an industry that you have to be very specific about what it is that you're doing and what it is that you're providing and supporting.

We have been made aware of boats that have had security breaches, but we were not engaged to support their network at that time. We may have just been only the satellite solution provider. It wasn't specifically Kerio Control, but the situation necessitated them to reevaluate their network and invest in their network rather than just have it as a passive source.

We are evaluating Juniper. In terms of monitoring, the response from Juniper was good. We requested a demo, and we got more than a demo. They went above and beyond to get a specialist in security who sat with the team. He presented not just what the product can do; he also presented what is involved in security. Their support seems good. From what they demonstrated, its monitoring, reporting, and intrusion detection features look pretty good.

We looked at Kerio Control vs Sophos Cyberoam. 

Ubiquiti is cloud-hosted. We use a lot of those as well. If that was around at the time, in the same way it is now, we probably would have used that to start with.

We also looked into Ubiquiti UniFi system and decided to go with Kerio.

Kerio ended up being a much better solution. 

I compared KerioControl with other companies based on price, functionality, features, and ease of use, ultimately choosing KerioControl as the best option.

I looked into Palo Alto, that had a lot of features and everything else. But when I tried to contact them to get a price, they didn't give me the time of day. They wouldn't even return my call. At the time I was a director for a very large company and they still ignored me.

We tried FortiGate and Mikrotik, but they don't do what we want. Licensing is easier with Kerio Control. Also, troubleshooting and implementation on a network is much easier. You don't need to call support all the time. With FortiGate, we realized the licensing is really hectic, because if you skip one year, you have to back pay that year. If you skip two years, you have to back pay two years. With Kerio Control, if a license expires, one year later you can just reactivate and go on.

It tells you what your users are doing or what is happening on your network. It goes into detail and you don't find that on FortiGate.

We looked at pfSense and some paid firewall solutions, but in terms of how user-friendly it is for our employees and my colleagues, and how well we could manage it from a remote portal, Kerio Control was better, in our opinion.

Every year we evaluate other options like Sophos and Kaspersky.

Yes, FortiGate.

Yes we looked at Cyberoam and Sophos.

We have evaluated WatchGuard and pfSense as well. We basically need something that is easy for the client because they want to have control over everything, and that's what Kerio is going to give them.

Yes, we evaluated Cisco, Fortinet, and Check Point.