We performed a comparison between pfSense and Untangle NG Firewall based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products received high marks from reviewers, but Untangle NG Firewall ultimately won out in this comparison. It is easy to set up, user-friendly and secure. In addition it has excellent customer support and is fairly priced.
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"FortiGate Secure SD-WAN includes best-of-breed next-generation firewall (NGFW) security, SD-WAN, advanced routing, and WAN optimization capabilities, delivering a security-driven networking WAN edge transformation in a unified offering."
"The features that prevent internet connections, the filtering are the most valuable because we did not have any internet protection before."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use."
"It is very flexible to use."
"The virtual firewall feature is the most valuable. We have around 1,500 firewalls. We did not buy individual hardware, and the virtual firewalls made sense because we don't have to keep on buying the hardware. FortiGate is easier to use as compared to Checkpoint devices. It is user friendly and has a good UI. You don't need much expertise to work on this firewall. You don't need to worry much about DCLA, commands, and things like that."
"Valuable features include the Web Application Firewall, and it even has DLP (data leak prevention)."
"I especially like the VPN part. It works like a charm."
"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."
"Its features rival many of the high cost solutions out there."
"The tools' most valuable feature is load balancing."
"The flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"It has a very nice web interface, and it is very simple to use. The way policies are working is also good."
"Creation of certificates and the facility to administer services are valuable features."
"The features I have found best are ease of use, GUI, and performance."
"It is very easy to deploy and monitor. "
"The features I have found the most useful are the web filter, the captive portal, the SSL inspector, and the ad-blocker. They're awesome."
"Application Control and filtering features are valuable."
"All features are useful. We are using premium features such as bandwidth sharing, failover, web filters, SSL controls, antivirus, and VPN. We use these features to the fullest. These features are available in the paid firewall license, not the free one."
"We find the web filter very valuable."
"None of my clients has had a ransom or breach using Untangle."
"What I like about this product, which is the reason that we continue to use it, is that you can install the software version on your own hardware. In case there is a problem with the hardware, we can just install the firewall in another machine and restore the configuration."
"The majority of our clients are very small businesses, and Untangle devices have been fantastic for these small clients. We've basically standardized our stack to just simply use Untangle. We include the hardware and the service option, which makes it very easy and affordable for us to just simply push that into the monthly per-user costing that we provide as a managed services provider. It's really a no-brainer. They're easy to use, and they're easy to set up and configure. Support is generally good about resolving any issues that we have. We haven't had any real complaints."
"Performance and technical support are the main issues with this solution."
"Reporting is limited to providing an external appliance for improving the reporting capabilities of the FortiAnalyzer. It does not offer a central management and is also sold separably as an appliance."
"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."
"MTBF: Hardware failure is more common when compared to SonicWall or Cisco ASA."
"The solution could have licensing fees reduced in the future."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"We are at the moment looking to use it as a proxy service so that we can limit what websites people go and view and that sort of thing. That's an area I've struggled with a little bit at the moment and it could be a bit easier to set up."
"I would like to see multiple DNS servers running on individual interfaces."
"Needs services on additional features, such as managing inventory and generating reports."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"pfSense is not user-friendly. I hope to have something to make the interfaces more user-friendly."
"The product could offer more integrated plugins."
"This solution is good for small businesses but it is not as stable as other competitors such as Fortinet."
"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."
"We have a minor issue when assigning IP addresses in the ARP tables. You should be able to go into the ARP tables, look at the IP address and say, "Nope, they need to be on this side on this IP address." The ability to set a DHP reservation from the ARP tables would be great. It's no big deal, but it would be nice to have."
"It would be much easier if there was a mobile app."
"The biggest challenge that we have with this solution is local support. The local support is a problem in our area."
"The hardware can be improved."
"Whenever there are a large number of endpoint VPN clients, connectivity becomes slow."
"It does have multi-factor authentication in some areas, but I would love to see a more widely implemented version of that on the devices themselves."
"They don't have any feature that allows you to drop the session."
"Web-filtering policies could be improved."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Untangle NG Firewall is ranked 27th in Firewalls with 22 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Untangle NG Firewall is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Untangle NG Firewall writes "Its simplicity, variety of features, and low pricing have enabled us to improve the security for our small business clients at a price that they are happy to pay for". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Untangle NG Firewall is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, SonicWall TZ and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Untangle NG Firewall report.
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