We performed a comparison between Hillstone E-Series 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."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."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"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."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"The most valuable features of the Hillstone E-Series are its hardware capacity, innovation, and the throughput that the hardware can take."
"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."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It only took a few hours to deploy."
"Five out of five ROI."
"The most valuable feature of the Hillstone E-Series is its user-friendliness."
"Working with the Hillstone E-Series has, from a remote perspective, allowed me to give my clients a secure connectivity."
"My company mainly works in the health and educational domain, schools and universities. I prevent the improper use of content from schools and universities. I defend the medical records for the patients in our hospitals. That is the main use case for me for the firewall."
"Firewall system for small, medium, and large data networks. It allows you to provide security to your environment: DMZ networks, LAN, WAN, etc."
"The initial setup was straightforward, therefore I wanted to continue using the product."
"It is a better firewall than others and it has better features."
"What I like about pfSense is that it works well and runs on an inexpensive appliance."
"I handle the scanning for the finance department. I recently encountered an issue with the PCL bills, our company bills. I resolved the matter, cleared the bill, and received calls regarding it using pfsense.The user interface is extremely user-friendly, which is why we use it across various plant sites. Our IT representatives at the plants find it easy to use and manage because of its straightforward interface."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
"In the next release, maybe the documentation on how to use this solution could be improved."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"Fortinet FortiGate should improve the VPN tokens."
"There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have."
"The tool needs to improve its price."
"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."
"I am not sure if this solution offers active directory integration. Adding that feature will definitely be an advantage."
"Support from Hillstone E-Series has a shortcoming that needs improvement."
"Having frequent live webinars on a monthly basis would really help."
"The solution doesn't have a web proxy built into the system like Sophos. This is something they should work to change."
"The current usage reporting is very basic."
"I've never tried it in large environments. All my clients are small businesses with a handful of employees, so I am not sure how it works in large environments. I keep up with recent versions, and there's nothing I'm waiting for, and nothing breaks when I get a new version."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
"The GUI. There are TONS of plugins for pfSense, as such, if a user wants to add quite a bit of functionality, the GUI will feel a little congested."
"They could improve their commercial stance and be more agile when it comes to the commercial pricing of enterprise deals."
"It would be great to add more to security."
"The router monitoring needs improvement when compared with Sonicwall."
"There's a bit of a learning curve during the initial implementation."
"The solution could always work at being more secure. It's a good idea to continue to work on security features and capabilities in order to ensure they can keep clients safe."
Hillstone E-Series is ranked 33rd in Firewalls with 9 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Hillstone E-Series is rated 9.0, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. 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 Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Hillstone E-Series is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, OpenVPN Access Server, Meraki MX and A10 Networks Thunder CFW, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Hillstone E-Series vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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