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."What I like the most is the configuration and that it's simple, and straightforward to maintain."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"The signature database and zero-day detection are Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features."
"It is easy to manage, and it doesn't need much knowledge from the team. It is a stable device, and there are many features that are included out of the box."
"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"Secure, user-friendly, stable, and scalable network security solution. Installation is straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and the UI. It has always provided me with what I needed. I have no need for additional costs that other solutions have, such as Sophos."
"All networks are security-driven, we get throughputs and security. We feel that the people at Fortinet are easy to deal with from a support standpoint. If they need to jump in and help us, they're very willing to do that. Their email filtering, their data loss prevention, their intrusion prevention, type of products in the newest OSs has been outstanding."
"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."
"The VDOM (Virtual DOM) is a virtualized firewall that has some opportunities for flexibility that are an advantage in certain configurations."
"It efficiently manages large-scale firewall deployments."
"I am satisfied with Fortinet FortiOS. It's a cool product and has a lot of UTM features. It has application control, web filtering, antivirus, IPS/IDS, DNS filtering, and many things in that firewall. It also has a web application firewall WAF feature. On the feature side, it's a good firewall."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiOS are user-friendliness, ease of use, and threat prevention."
"I like that the firewall gives me a lot of control in terms of outgoing and inbound traffic, and it scores better in deep packet inspections when compared with the Azure Firewall."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiOS are its simplicity, highly user-centric, and performs well. The line speed and for heavy traffic, is helpful for us."
"The redundancy and scalability ARE very nice."
"What I like about pfSense is that it works well and runs on an inexpensive appliance."
"I had some outages in the network and we provide services for our company. We sell mobile credits. The terminal gets access to our own server inside the network and if one internet fails, then the other one is still up and we have a back-up link on the devices."
"The plugins or add-ons are most valuable. Sometimes, they are free of charge, and sometimes, you have to pay for them, but you can purchase or download very valuable plugins or add-ons to perform internal testing of your network and simulate a denial-of-service attack or whichever attack you want to simulate. You can also remote and monitor your network and see where the gap is. Did you forget a printer port? Most attacks at the moment are happening through printers, and they can tell you immediately that you forgot to close the port of the printer. There are more than one million printers that are in danger, and everybody knows that hackers are using them to enter the network. So, you can download plugins to protect your network."
"The ability to create a VPN allows me to monitor branch offices from a central location."
"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."
"pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home."
"I have found the firewall portion for the blocking most valuable."
"I feel that the reporting needs to be improved."
"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 way everything is set up could be easier. Currently, people need a lot of experience and knowledge to administer it and to link it to devices."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"It should provide better visibility over the network and more information in the form of reports for the end users. Its installation should also be easier."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"I use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"For monitoring purposes, we don't have any option to monitor the ISP link."
"The solution's graphic interface could be a bit more responsive and include notations when changes are made."
"Fortinet FortiOS could improve by having better authentication methods with Microsoft or Google Services."
"They're using a lot of application-specific IC, so that may be causing some performance issues. And whenever a Fortinet adds new features, it can affect performance."
"The reporting for this solution could be improved. It could also be more stable and offer better pricing."
"In the future I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards and a drop in the price."
"It would be better if AWS instances were available. If I want to upgrade from T2.small to T2.medium, it should be available rather than having a big instance and paying a lot of money for that. The issue is that we had deployed in AWS Cloud, and we were using a very small instance. Recently we wanted to move in-house and deploy it on the big instance because it was struggling with the RAM. If we use T2.small, we cannot upgrade it to the T2.medium. It has predefined instances in the marketplace with a lot of cost differences. If I can increase the RAM, I have to choose the T3.large instance. If I'm paying $270 for the small instance, I have to pay more than double the cost for T3.large. It is about $850, and this is not good. So, it would be better if it was cheaper. I think both AWS and Fortinet should think about that. They should provide it on lower instances as well. If I want to upgrade it from T2.small to T2.medium, it should be available, but it's a problem."
"FortiOS's interface and monitoring could be improved."
"The Netgate forums and community don’t provide extensive discussions and topics related to every pfSense service."
"The integration should be improved."
"The solution requires a lot of administration."
"The GUI could use improvements, though it is manageable."
"Network monitoring and device inventory could use some improvements. I'm using SpiceWorks for this because it never really worked in pfSense."
"Also, the GUI is helpful, but it's not user-friendly. It's complicated. It should be more intuitive for the average user and have an excellent graphical view. Of course, the user will typically know about network administration, but it still should be easy to understand."
"The hotspot and the portal feature in this solution are not stable for WiFi access. We use it at least once or twice every day and it crashes. Some modules can be better by improving detection and having new updates. Additionally, we have some issues with clustering and load balancing that could improve."
"This solution is good for small businesses but it is not as stable as other competitors such as Fortinet."
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 FortiGate-VM, Fortinet FortiWeb, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and OPNsense, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Fortinet FortiOS vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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