We performed a comparison between Hillstone E-Series and KerioControl 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."The base firewall features are quite valuable to us."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"The solution is scalable."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that it is good to use, and most importantly, the pricing. The customer especially likes the discount when they trade up or something like that."
"FortiGate firewalls are easy to manage through a user-friendly web interface. They also have advanced features like DDoS and DLP. However, I wouldn't recommend enabling all of these features on one device because it can cause performance issues."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"FortiGate's web and URL filtering are unlike any other firewall I've used. The functionality of URL filtering in those solutions is problematic because everything is encrypted, and firewalls can't break that encryption protocol. Fortinet has an SSL proxy, so the encryption is done before the packet ever leaves the FortiGate. The URL filter is definitely one of the most helpful features."
"The most valuable features of the Hillstone E-Series are its hardware capacity, innovation, and the throughput that the hardware can take."
"Working with the Hillstone E-Series has, from a remote perspective, allowed me to give my clients a secure connectivity."
"The most valuable feature of the Hillstone E-Series is its user-friendliness."
"I am impressed with the application filtering feature."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The installation is easy, we have not had any complaints from our customers."
"Very reliable solution with good scalability and straightforward implementation."
"Five out of five ROI."
"The most valuable features of Kerio Control are the IPS and traffic rules. The traffic rules are very user-friendly and the IPS is working well. Additionally, the anti-virus is effective with quick options, such as filtering."
"When one of the employees of my customers is using the VPN Client, I have created for them that they will always get a message. When the VPN Client connects to Kerio Control from the outside, they will get an email so they know when they are connected and when they are disconnected what is happening to their network."
"The installation is straightforward."
"The solution’s firewall and intrusion detection features are quite good because you can see exactly who is attacking you and who is getting blocked."
"Setup is simple. The Kerio interface is very intuitive."
"The interface control manager where we can allocate LAN connections to certain VLANs is the most valuable feature. The other feature that's important for us is because obviously everything is remote with MyKerio, as long as the boat has an internet connection, we can log onto the Kerio and get statistics, as well as provide support."
"We also like the security. We can control what sites users can go to and we can make sure that where they're going is appropriate and that it's work-related."
"I like intrusion detection and prevention and bandwidth management. The routing part is also awesome. It is a good firewall. We never had a major breach from outside. We've never been impacted by ransomware, and our systems have never been infiltrated."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"To the best of my knowledge, Fortinet does not have a CASB solution and Fortinet does not have a Zero trust solution."
"The logging details need to be improved."
"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The customization could be improved. Cisco, for example, is much better at this. They need to work to be at least as good as they are."
"Its filtering is sometimes too precise or strict. We sometimes have to bypass and authorize some of the sites, but they get blocked. We know that they are trusted sites, but they are blocked, and we don't know why."
"The current usage reporting is very basic."
"The tool provides just a general report. It does not provide a granular report. Hence, the tool should work on its reporting feature."
"SSL VPN license cost is not cheap."
"The solution doesn't have a web proxy built into the system like Sophos. This is something they should work to change."
"Support from Hillstone E-Series has a shortcoming that needs improvement."
"Having frequent live webinars on a monthly basis would really help."
"I am not sure if this solution offers active directory integration. Adding that feature will definitely be an advantage."
"The tool needs to improve its price."
"When it comes to dealing with updates, there are often bugs on the solution. They should do a lot more testing before they release new versions."
"Kerio Control has just improved on their biggest problem, which was to introduce better support for high-availability requirements in production."
"If I would suggest anything, it would be to expand on its multifactor authentication to be a little bit more user-friendly. They should do multifactor authentications for the client itself perhaps, rather than served on a webpage, in a page hijack, that might be more user-friendly, but I don't have a lot of complaints about it. It's doing its job. You have to have a certain amount of skills to configure these things anyway, the ones that we use on-site doing point-to-point, and we've been tricked up a few times with their interfaces."
"The improvement that we are looking for is for when decide to move some part of our application to the cloud."
"The upgrades make the network slower."
"There's also room for improvement in the Traffic Rules. We define networks to use a specific outgoing interface, say VSAT, shore, or marine WiFi, which is okay. But then all we have is a checkbox that says "Use other internet interfaces if this one is unavailable." What we would prefer would be to have a priority list. So if VSAT is unavailable, try to use 4G, etc. We haven't really found a reliable way of doing that in the current release."
"It has a VPN back to our data center but I don't think it has increased the number of VPN clients extended to those outside our environment"
"After the takeover by GFI, one of the things that Kerio built was MyKerio environment. This has not been very reliable because I get many messages that MyKerio is not functioning. For some reason, there are things that they changed and it is not very reliable at this moment, instead I have to connect to the firewall to see what is happening."
Hillstone E-Series is ranked 33rd in Firewalls with 9 reviews while KerioControl is ranked 28th in Firewalls with 54 reviews. Hillstone E-Series is rated 9.0, while KerioControl is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Hillstone E-Series writes "A user-friendly and marketable solution with a virtual switching capability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of KerioControl writes "With VPN, any of our guys can log in to the system and effectively be on board; helps with our customers all over the world". Hillstone E-Series is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, OpenVPN Access Server, Netgate pfSense and Meraki MX, whereas KerioControl is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Hillstone E-Series vs. KerioControl report.
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