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.
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."
"I am "headache free" that I don't have to categorize all the websites and that security has been pre categorized by the people, and that the services are getting updated. At least one part of my problem is over."
"Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs. We have scaled already from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"This solution made it very easy to manage our bandwidth."
"The most valuable feature is the FortiManager for centralized management."
"The VPN is our most widely used feature for Cisco Secure Firewall. Since we were forced into a hybrid working situation by COVID a few years back, VPN is the widely used feature because everybody is working remotely for our agency. So it came in very handy."
"The monitoring dashboard is valuable to us for troubleshooting."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is robust and reliable."
"I work with Cisco and other partners, but the Cisco team is the best team in our country. When I call them, they always help us."
"The stability of Cisco ASA is excellent compared to other products on the market. Because of our customer experience as an integrator company, our clients never report any performance problems. We have a good performance reputation with Cisco ASA."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement."
"Simple to deploy, stable."
"I have found the firewall portion for the blocking most valuable."
"It is a stable solution. It is also easy to install and can be deployed and maintained by one team member."
"I especially like the VPN part. It works like a charm."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"The solution is very robust."
"For everyday tasks, we just get alerts. It's anything that's suspicious, including from our Netgate. So, it's part of how we maintain cybersecurity in our school. This is working alongside our endpoint security solution."
"We generally use it because it's cheap. When we need something more robust we use Barracuda and Sony Wireless Routers. For certain clients, we use pfSense because it's compatible with the VoIP platform."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"It is quite new for us, and we need to go more in-depth into the monitoring tools. It provides different features that we need to do what we want. So far, it is okay for us. In terms of improvement, in the future, they can provide a faster implementation of features. Some of the features are first available in other solutions. Fortinet sometimes takes a little bit longer than other solutions, such as Check Point, to implement new features."
"MTBF: Hardware failure is more common when compared to SonicWall or Cisco ASA."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having a frequent ask questions(FAQ) area for people to receive quick answers to popular questions. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have an SMS notification feature. For example, if you cannot access your email you could receive an SMS message."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"I haven't had a single issue since using Fortinet."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"It doesn't have Layer 7 security."
"The IPS module is combined with the main operating system."
"When we talk about data centers, we are talking about 100 gig capacity or 400 gig capacity. When it comes to active-active solution clustering and resilience and performance, Cisco should look into these a little bit more."
"I would like it to be easier to work with and have a better user interface. It is not straightforward. You need to know the Cisco command-line interface."
"These firewalls are not for beginners."
"There should be more integration with Microsoft Identity."
"10Gb interfaces should be available on more models."
"Other firewalls, upgrading is a very easy task; from the graphical user interface, you just need to import the firmware versions into it and install it. In this firewall, you need to have a third-party solution in both. It's a process. It's a procedure, a hard procedure, actually, so there is no straightforward procedure for upgrading."
"pfSense could improve by having a sandboxing feature that I have seen in SonicWall. However, maybe it is available I am not aware of it."
"If a user doesn't have a large amount of experience in Linux systems, they will have problems using this solution. Users need to be highly skilled in troubleshooting competency. Users who do not have such skills will find the product difficult to use."
"When I checked other packages, it seems they use different tools that are installed on the PSS for functionality. They rely on third-party tools, unlike Fortinet, for example, which has its own tools. In comparison, we also use third-party tools on pfSense. For example, we had a situation where we needed a tool to identify authorized users, and when I searched for a solution, I found a third-party tool. However, using such tools may come with additional costs."
"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."
"The user interface can be improved to make it easier to add more features. And pfSense could be better integrated with other solutions, like antivirus."
"They can improve the dynamic of the input of IPs from outside."
"It needs to be more secure."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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