We performed a comparison between Juniper SRX Series Firewall and pfSense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Juniper SRX Series Firewall is appreciated for its simplicity, intuitive interface, and robust assistance. It provides functionalities like site-to-site VPN, firewall security, and routing capabilities. pfSense is highly regarded for its capacity to obstruct IP addresses, user-friendly dashboards, and open-source characteristics. It offers features such as secure VPN connections, scanning, filtering, and network security capabilities.
Juniper SRX Series Firewall could use enhancements in capacity limitations, reporting and alerts, user interface, device reliability, documentation, and feature enhancements. pfSense would benefit from improvements in instructional videos, web interface clarity, stability, mobile application, centralized management, GUI for SMBs, sandboxing, security, hardware support, user-friendliness, log analysis, VPN capacity, documentation, configuration processes, and SD-WAN integration.
Service and Support: Customers have generally praised Juniper SRX Series Firewall's customer service for being helpful and knowledgeable, despite occasional slower response times. pfSense's customer service varies among users, with some having positive experiences with technical support and others relying on clear documentation and community resources.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Juniper SRX Series Firewall can be done within a day for smaller branch offices, whereas pfSense be set up in just 15 minutes. Juniper may demand familiarity with CLI, while pfSense is commonly referred to as being easy to use.
Pricing: Juniper has extra charges for advanced security features and APS, whereas pfSense provides updates without any additional fees. The specific licensing costs for pfSense are not clearly stated.
ROI: Juniper SRX Series Firewall provides advanced security features and reliable performance, leading to a favorable return on investment. pfSense stands out for its affordability, minimal management expenses, and substantial hardware cost savings. Users also emphasize its superior ROI compared to pricier alternatives such as FortiGate.
Comparison Results: Juniper SRX Series Firewall is the preferred product over pfSense. Users appreciate its simplicity, intuitive interface, reliability, scalability, and exceptional customer support. It offers convenient configuration, site-to-site VPN capabilities, and effective firewall protection. Additionally, Juniper SRX Series Firewall is considered a more cost-effective and secure solution.
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and there are several operating systems that can include the hardware capacities. In the newer releases, the resources were more useful because they were included in the operating system."
"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."
"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."
"This solution has helped our organization by having strong functions and a reliable firewall."
"It is very fast and very easy to maintain. Another nice part of it is that you can easily extract the logs and move them over to a security operations center."
"The high availability of the application is good."
"From a protection perspective, it provides a network perimeter security function for our company."
"On a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best I'd give Juniper SRX an overall rating of eight because of its' competitive price."
"Most of our clients use it as a traditional firewall, blocking Layer 3 and Layer 4, blocking by transport."
"I have used technical support quite a bit, and they are really good."
"The most powerful feature in Juniper SRX is definitely NCLS."
"One of Juniper SRX's most valuable features is the site-to-site VPN."
"It has a very nice web interface, and it is very simple to use. The way policies are working is also good."
"I mostly like all of it. Whatever we use is valuable."
"Great extensibility of the platform."
"I am happy with the EPLS, the radius, and I am happy with the captive portal."
"The most valuable features of pfSense are the reports, monitoring, filtration, and blocking incoming and outgoing traffic."
"Creation of certificates and the facility to administer services are valuable features."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and the capture photo."
"Its features rival many of the high cost solutions out there."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
"Stability and technical support are the two major issues I have found with Fortinet."
"The ease of use could be improved."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"The room for improvement is about the global delivery time period. Usually I need to wait for almost one month to deliver it overseas. So if you can shorten the deliver time it'd be great."
"For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial."
"Sometimes committing configurations takes a lot of time in Juniper because of the connections, and it could be a little bit faster."
"I would like to see endpoint control and endpoint testing security."
"In comparison to other enterprise-level firewalls, such as Cisco FTD, Cisco has improved significantly. In the past, I believed that Juniper SRX was superior, but after seeing the advancements in the FTD platform, Cisco has better functionality. I have not recently explored Juniper SRX's next-generation firewall capabilities as we only use basic firewall filtering in our enterprise network."
"The centralized management platform could be improved."
"The solution could cost less. It's a bit expensive right now."
"In the future, I would like to see the UI more responsive"
"I've noticed that the management interface could use some updates and upgrades."
"The visibility/reporting could be better. To see something, you have to export the log to a syslog and then process with another product."
"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."
"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."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"The product must provide integration with other solutions."
"There's a bit of a learning curve during the initial implementation."
"The technical support needs to be improved."
"Reporting and real-time monitoring, since I'm used to Watchguard's reporting features, it would be nice to have an embedded solution for reporting."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
Juniper SRX Series Firewall is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 86 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Juniper SRX Series Firewall is rated 7.8, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Juniper SRX Series Firewall writes "Highly scalable, user-friendly UI, and easy to maintain". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Juniper SRX Series Firewall is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Check Point NGFW and Meraki MX, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM and KerioControl. See our Juniper SRX Series Firewall vs. Netgate pfSense report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.