We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall vs. pfSense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco Secure Firewall and pfSense come out about equal in this comparison. Cisco ASA Firewall has a slight edge when it comes to service and support, but pfSense has an edge when it comes to pricing.
"All the rules are secure and we haven't had a significant malware attack in the five years that we've been using ASA Firewall. It has been a tremendous improvement for our network. However, I can't quantify the benefits in monetary terms."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"It has definitely improved our organization. It gives us remote connectivity, helps workers connect remotely, and also gives us good connectivity to our other branches."
"It's very stable and mature."
"With the pandemic, people began working from home. That was a pretty big move, having all our users working from a home. More capacity needed to be added to our remote VPN. ASA did this very well."
"It's very scalable. You can go to different models of the ASAs and they scale up to as big as you want to go."
"We find all of its features very useful. Its main features are policies and access lists. We use both of them, and we also use routing."
"The technical support is excellent. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. When there has been an issue, we have had a good response from them."
"Sophos Intercept X is scalable. Currently, we have almost 30 people using it in our company."
"pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"What I like about pfSense is that it works well and runs on an inexpensive appliance."
"What I found most valuable is the cost of the platform, the flexibility of the platform, and the fact that the ongoing fees are not there as they are with the competitor. Some people may think you're taking a risk with using Opensource. I think it just provides the end user, specifically for us small, medium business providers of services, the flexibility we need at the right cost to provide them a higher end, almost enterprise type service."
"pfSense allows us to spread the hours of connection and do the filtering on the pfSense site."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"It is a stable solution. It is also easy to install and can be deployed and maintained by one team member."
"The graphical interface could be improved. From what I have seen, Fortinet, for example, has a nicer GUI."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"The operation of the ASA is good but the problem is that whenever you require an upgrade, there are multiple pieces of software that you have to upgrade. Extensive planning is required, because if you upgrade one piece of the software it has to be compatible with the others as well. You always need to check the compatibility metrics."
"It is my understanding that they are in the process of discontinuing this device."
"The performance should be improved."
"Cisco should work on ASDM. One of the biggest drawbacks of Cisco ASA is ASDM GUI. Cisco should improve the ASDM GUI. The configuration through ASDM is really difficult as compared to CLI. Sometimes when you are doing the configuration in ASDM, it suddenly crashes. It also crashes while pushing a policy. Cisco should really work on this."
"We are still running the original ASAs. The software that you are running for the ASDM software and Java application has never been a lot of fun to operate. It would have been nice to see that change update be redesigned with modern systems, which don't play nicely with Java sometimes. Cybersecurity doesn't seem to love how that operates. For us, a fresher application, taking advantage of the hardware, would have been a better approach."
"It would be good if Cisco made sure that the solution supports all routing protocols. Sometimes it doesn't."
"The product could offer more integrated plugins."
"Other solutions provide more scope for growth. For instance, we can have only 10 to 20 employees on VPN, but other solutions can support more users. We also have more capabilities to increase the performance of the solution."
"I have been using WireGuard VPN because it is a lot faster and more secure than an open VPN. However, in the latest version of pfSense, they have removed this feature, which is one of the main features that I need. They should include this feature."
"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."
"It's just not listed as FIPS compliant for where we're at now in government, which is an issue."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"If you want to take advantage of all of the solution's options, you need to have a bit of a technical background. It's not for a layperson."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 126 reviews while pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 54 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.4, while pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "The ability to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments is important, given the fluidity in the world of security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Juniper SRX and Check Point NGFW, whereas pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and Sophos UTM. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. pfSense report.
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