"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 most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"Its Snort 3 IPS has better flexibility as far as being able to write rules. This gives me better granularity."
"The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands."
"I like the firewall features, Snort, and the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)."
"The solution offers very easy configurations."
"The most valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS."
"It has a good security level. It is a next-generation firewall. It can protect from different types of attacks. We have enabled IPS and IDS."
"The initial setup is a breeze."
"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 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."
"One very good thing about the Kerio device is its authentication. I don't have a Windows domain for authentication. Instead, I use the Kerio product because it can separate users by Mac addresses and give them IP addresses based on their usernames, automatically logging them in. This makes for a very simple authentication system."
"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."
"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."
"It has saved a lot of time and it was a secure way of doing it too. We had a whole contact center that worked from home for a period of time and that's a 21 hour a day contact center that we moved, that was spread out across the greater Brisbane region and working on home internet connections. Surprisingly, we didn't have a lot of stability issues anyway on those connections, but Kerio didn't blink, so that was good."
"The firewall and intrusion detection features are good. It has blocked certain things. We have a lot of blocked sites that the staff or anyone using it, the public, etc., can't go on. It works for that. I get quite a few messages every now and again, saying that a virus has been detected and I can go in and block the user who's causing the problem."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"At our peak time, we have reached more than 5,000 concurrent connections."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"pfSense is a nice product, and I find that there's a lot of information out there. There are some good tutorials on YouTube and other websites with helpful information."
"One of the advantages of pfSense is that it is very easy to work with. It is a very good open-source solution, and it works really well. pfSense provides a complete package. For some features, it could be the first solution in the world. It is a very good alternative in the market for a firewall solution. You don't need to go to Cisco or other brands with expensive firewalls. pfSense also allows us to offer some support services."
"The features I have found best are ease of use, GUI, and performance."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"The flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"I would like it to have faster deployment times. A typical deployment could take two to three minutes. Sometimes, it depends on the situation. It is better than it was in the past, but it could always use improvement."
"I believe that the current feature set of the device is very good and the only thing that Cisco should work on is improving the user experience with the device."
"One of my colleagues is using the firewall as an IPS, but he is worried about Firepower's performance... With the 10 Gb devices, when it gets to 5 Gbps, the CPU usage goes up a lot and he cannot manage the IPS."
"They need a VTI. I know it's going to be available in the next software version, which is the 6.7 version. However, the problem with that is that the 6.7 is going to deprecate all the older IKEv1 deployment tunnels. Therefore, the problem is that we have a lot of customers which are using older encryptions. If I do that, update it, it's not going to work for me."
"Web filtering needs improvement because sometimes the URL is miscategorized."
"In a future release, it would be ideal if they could offer an open interface to other security products so that we could easily connect to our own open industry standard."
"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."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"There isn't a lot to be improved. It works well as it is, but they can maybe improve the reporting side."
"I can no longer renew my subscription directly with GFI but we have to go through third-party resellers like CDW. The first time I did it with CDW. I went to CDW and it was almost like they didn't even know anything. They didn't know what package I was supposed to get. Then after I got it, it took almost five days to get everything working."
"The one thing that did put me off of the solution was that, after they were taken over by GFI, the licensing and a few other items have gotten very complicated."
"One of the problems we do have causes problems with the VPN. The software slows the throughput down too much. You could have a one-gigabit connection from the internet, and it slows it down to the area of upload and download is extremely slow. There's too much content filtering at that point."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It is hard to get a domain."
"My experience with the solutions technical support is fine but they could be faster in responding."
"I would like to be able to automatically send email from Kerio Control and have it tell me what my external IPs are, because on one of my lines I have a fixed IP address and on the other it is variable. If there were a permanent way for me to figure out, "Okay, my current external VPN and my firm IP is this," it would help. I need to know the IP address to connect with the VPN and, at the moment, one of the lines sometimes changes its IP address without me knowing it. It's a hassle to figure out what it is."
"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."
"Also, simplifying the rules for the GeoIP. Making it simpler to understand would be an improvement."
"Web interface could be enhanced and more user friendly."
"The technical support needs to be improved."
"The main problem with pfSense is that we have to use proxy solutions."
"The VPN feature of the solution could improve by adding better functionality and providing easier configure ability."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"The usage reports can be better."
"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."
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Kerio Control is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 33 reviews while pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 61 reviews. Kerio Control is rated 8.0, while pfSense is rated 8.4. 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 XG, Sophos UTM, OPNsense and Cisco ASA Firewall, whereas pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway. See our Kerio Control vs. pfSense report.
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