"The most important features are the intrusion prevention engine and the application visibility and control. The Snort feature in Firepower is also valuable."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"The implementation is pretty straightforward."
"One of the most valuable features is the AMP. It's very good and very reliable when it comes to malicious activities, websites, and viruses."
"Firepower has been used for quite a few enterprise clients. Most of our clients are Fortune 500 and Firepower is used to improve their end to end firewall functionality."
"One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now."
"I have integrated it for incidence response. If there is a security event, the Cisco firewall will automatically block the traffic, which is valuable."
"The solution is easy to manage. Kerio Control is unique compared to other firewalls because it has been around since 2000 when we switched and the name it started with was WinRoute, and then later became Kerio Control. It evolved over time and it is more of a proprietary firewall on its own and has been developed through open source."
"I love the VPN that we set up. A few of us have it on our computers so that if we leave, we can still access the stores. And we can work from home if needed. When I sign into that Kerio VPN, it links me like I'm sitting in the store. It puts me in our secure network so that I can sign on to each individual store and I can run numbers... If I have to work from home, it's so much faster than the way we used to do it."
"The firewall appliance itself is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"One thing we use quite a lot, as well, is the DHCP Server, because we do a lot of work where all our devices need to have static IP addresses. Rather than going around and configuring every box, we do it all through DHCP reservations. It's easier. We've got a record of it. We can manipulate it if we need to change something or change some hardware. It's all easy. Even guys who are not used to using it can pick it up quite quickly."
"It is very comprehensive and simple. It has all the active protections. It's updated. We love that you can set how often it is updated so you can work what is right for you. A large company with a lot of bandwidth can update the virus definitions and security definitions hourly, if they want. A smaller site that's remote, where maybe updating the definitions will eat into the bandwidth, we can schedule those more to go later at night. It's very flexible and works for us in all types of situations. This is great because then we don't have to learn seven different products to be able to work with seven different scenarios."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It is hard to get a domain."
"The routing of the multiple internet physical routers I have is the most valuable feature of this solution. Instead of me physically unplugging a cable from one router to the server, if one connection goes down, it automatically switches for me. So I can have all three of them plugged in. If one goes down, it just picks up the other one automatically. There's no physical cable swapping."
"I have found the firewall portion for the blocking most valuable."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"pfSense is easy to use, has user-friendly dashboards, and useful blocking features."
"The concurrent users are perfect for us."
"It is a stable solution. It is also easy to install and can be deployed and maintained by one team member."
"I have found pfSense to be stable."
"The interface is straightforward and easy to use."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"The price and SD-WAN capabilities are the areas that need improvement."
"The visibility for VPN is one big part. The policy administration could be improved in terms of customizations and flexibility for changing it to our needs."
"The solution could offer better control that would allow the ability to restrictions certain features from a website."
"We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond."
"Its interface is sometimes is a little bit slow, and it can be improved. When you need to put your appliance in failover mode, it is a little difficult to do it remotely because you need to turn off the appliance in Cisco mode. In terms of new features, it would be good to have AnyConnect VPN with Firepower. I am not sure if it is available at the moment."
"One feature I would like to see, that Firepower doesn't have, is email security. Perhaps in the future, Cisco will integrate Cisco Umbrella with Firepower. I don't see why we should have to pay for two separate products when both could be integrated in one box."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second."
"If you have to dive deeper into the firewall or any other features, then you really have to read up a bit about how to set it up properly. Some of my colleagues, in the beginning, jumped in and made a bunch of rules but then it got really messy. If Kerio had a template or guidelines for best practices, at the beginning, that would really help. With Kerio Control it's basically 'find out for yourself.'"
"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."
"When we did our last update, we had some trouble with the initial syncing process to get our messaging to go through. But we were also moving a store and a lot was changing during that process. I don't think it was on Kerio's end. It just coincided with the update. Once we got our third-party IT guy involved it was resolved very quickly."
"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"
"I find it a bit costly to pay for the products that I am not using. They need to change their model in such a way that you don't have to pay for the products that you are not using. Its local support and scalability are also not good. I am looking forward to a more scalable product that will be able to grow with time and technology."
"One area that confused me a bit when I was building my current network. I use VLANs to have separate functionality on the network, and the appliance I got was the WiFi model, but I discovered that you can't assign WiFi channels to the VLAN. So, you can have WiFi, but its own subnet. You can't run that over the VLAN. Effectively, I can't use the WiFi facility in the appliance and had to purchase a separate web that supports VLANs. In the end, I had to go to GFI support. They confirmed this is just a limited functionality of that device, as it is a low-end device. I don't know if any of their high-end models have a better facility or not."
"I would like the customer statistics to be more user-friendly. It should explain more what users have been doing throughout the day. Sometimes, it'll just say they downloaded a big file. Meanwhile, they were connected through a VPN."
"The solution should offer more dashboards."
"The integration of pfSense with EPS and EDS could be better. Also, it should be easier to get reports on how many users are connecting simultaneously and how sections connect in real-time."
"We had training from an advisor for the configuring of this solution and it was not difficult. However, if we were not trained it would have been not as easy."
"User interface is a little clumsy."
"The hotspot and the portal feature in this solution are not stable for WiFi access. We use it at least once or twice every day and it crashes. Some modules can be better by improving detection and having new updates. Additionally, we have some issues with clustering and load balancing that could improve."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
"In an upcoming release, the reporting could be more user-friendly. For example, the reporting in graphs and charts for the host can be cumbersome."
"The main problem with pfSense is that we have to use proxy 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."
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Kerio Control is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 32 reviews while pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 60 reviews. Kerio Control is rated 8.0, while pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Kerio Control writes "Through the ease of how quickly we could roll out the VPN to everybody, we had whole companies remotely working overnight". On the other hand, the top reviewer of pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". Kerio Control is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG, OPNsense and Cisco ASA Firewall, whereas pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway. See our Kerio Control vs. pfSense report.
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