"The most valuable feature that Cisco Firepower NGFW provides for us is the Intrusion policy."
"The most valuable feature is stability."
"The content filtering is good."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"The implementation is pretty straightforward."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"Firepower NGFW has improved my organization in several ways. Before, we were trying to stamp out security threats and issues, it was a one-off type of way to attack it. I spent a lot of manpower trying to track down the individual issues or flare-ups that we would see. With Cisco's Firepower Management, we're able to have that push up to basically one monitor and one UI and be able to track that and stop threats immediately. It also gives us a little more granularity on what those threats might be."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the integrations and IPS throughput."
"Technical support is good. They quickly respond, and they even have local help here. They can actually give you an answer very quickly."
"Technical support has been quite helpful."
"We think they have a good interface, the operating system is good, it's robust. It has plenty of great features, and the relation between the cost and benefits works for our business."
"Juniper supports their products very well."
"The reason that we picked Juniper SRX is for the scalability, the fit for purpose, the tools that are available, the ongoing support and the ability to monitor, but particularly for the virtual routers in our data centers so that we can quickly upscale them when needed, when we need more throughput."
"The user interface is good."
"Great as an inter-segmentation firewall or border or arch-firewall."
"It is a part of the infrastructure when we're selling Juniper. That's what clients are familiar with and that's what they rely on."
"The most valuable features of pfSense are the reports, monitoring, filtration, and blocking incoming and outgoing traffic."
"It has a good web cache. I used to use a DHCP server and DNS server. For my company, I use pfSense as a load balancing application."
"A valuable feature is that the solution is open source."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"The documentation is very good."
"The intrusion detection feature is the most valuable. It is an open-source firewall, so there is a lot of material on it. I also find the open VPN capability very nice. It is pretty customizable. The clustering and the high availability are the two biggest things to be able to get out of a firewall."
"Good basic firewall features."
"I mostly like all of it. Whatever we use is valuable."
"We only have an issue with time sync with Cisco ASA and NTP. If the time is out of sync, it will be a disaster for the failover."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively."
"When you make any changes, irrespective of whether they are big or small, Firepower takes too much time. It is very time-consuming. Even for small changes, you have to wait for 60 seconds or maybe more, which is not good. Similarly, when you have many IPS rules and policies, it slows down, and there is an impact on its performance."
"The only drawback of the user interface is when it comes to policies. When you open it and click on the policies, you have to move manually left and right if you want to see the whole field within the cell. Checkpoint has a very detailed user interface."
"One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue."
"It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience."
"There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility."
"The solution could cost less. It's a bit expensive right now."
"The capacity can be limiting. We have outgrown its capacity. You can only scale up to a certain extent, depending on the device purchased."
"The range of devices should be expanded to include those suitable for a small implementation. Juniper does not have any lower-priced SRX models, useful perhaps for a single ATM or a single bank branch."
"The user interface is something that Juniper needs to improve."
"To compare with Fortinet, Juniper needs to improve their security features."
"The interface could be more user-friendly."
"Their models for service providers could improve."
"I would like to have a better web UI for administration. Juniper could simplify the web UI and make it more compatible with mobile devices."
"More documentation would be great, especially on new features because sometimes, when new features come out, you don't get to understand them right off the bat. You have to really spend a lot of time understanding them. So, more documentation would be awesome."
"The stability could be improved."
"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."
"In terms of areas of improvement, the interface seemed like it had a lot. The GUI interface that I had gotten into was rather elaborate. I don't know if they could zero in on some markets and potentially for small, medium businesses specifically, give them a stripped-down version of the GUI for pfSense."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"There is more demand for UTMs than a simple firewall. pfSense should support real-time features for handling the latest viruses and threats. It should support real-time checks and real-time status of threats. Some other vendors, such as Fortinet, already offer this type of capability. Such capability will be good for bringing pfSense at the same level as other solutions."
"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."
"The interface is not very shiny and attractive."
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Juniper SRX is ranked 14th in Firewalls with 37 reviews while pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 61 reviews. Juniper SRX is rated 7.8, while pfSense is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Juniper SRX writes "This best in class Next-Gen firewall is elegant in its ease-of-use and architecture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". Juniper SRX is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX and Check Point NGFW, whereas pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and Check Point NGFW. See our Juniper SRX vs. pfSense report.
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