We performed a comparison between Kerio Control and pfSense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: pfSense has the winning edge in this comparison because it received higher marks in the features, pricing, and service and support categories.
"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."
"The SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"It can expand easily."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"The installation is straightforward."
"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 product is easy to use."
"The stability of Kerio Control is good."
"Kerio Control can be scaled easily."
"I am impressed with the tool's firewall filtering capacity."
"I did not face any issues with stability while using the tool's trial version."
"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."
"My technicians find the pfSense's web interface very useful. It is very easy to use. pfSense is very reliable and stable. We like the OpenVPN clients that can be deployed using pfSense very much."
"The product’s documentation is good."
"I have found pfSense to be stable."
"The plugins or add-ons are most valuable. Sometimes, they are free of charge, and sometimes, you have to pay for them, but you can purchase or download very valuable plugins or add-ons to perform internal testing of your network and simulate a denial-of-service attack or whichever attack you want to simulate. You can also remote and monitor your network and see where the gap is. Did you forget a printer port? Most attacks at the moment are happening through printers, and they can tell you immediately that you forgot to close the port of the printer. There are more than one million printers that are in danger, and everybody knows that hackers are using them to enter the network. So, you can download plugins to protect your network."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"It is much simpler than other solutions such as Fortinet."
"I like pfSense's reports and how I can control access to the policies on the firewall."
"What I found most valuable is the cost of the platform, the flexibility of the platform, and the fact that the ongoing fees are not there as they are with the competitor. Some people may think you're taking a risk with using Opensource. I think it just provides the end user, specifically for us small, medium business providers of services, the flexibility we need at the right cost to provide them a higher end, almost enterprise type service."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"The scalability could be better."
"Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
"While FortiGate is cheaper than most other solutions, we're seeing increased license renewal costs. Most of our clients are asking for more significant discounts because the price is going up."
"The routing capability on the FortiGate devices has room for improvement."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"The GUI should be changed because it remains the same consistency across versions. However, those who have been using KerioControl for a long time may be accustomed to the current interface. Installing a new version in the same location makes it easy to find, but overall, there are no notable changes between versions."
"We'd like to have more integrations Kerio Operator."
"The Kerio hardware devices look cheap and could be improved. Some of our clients are switching to Sophos because their hardware has a more sleek design."
"The solution can be improved to create the capability for larger bandwidths that support our business needs."
"The filtering on the unlicensed version of Kerio Control is inefficient - you have to add each website manually, which isn't feasible."
"I would like to see a little improvement in their technical support when you have a problem. I may be a little jaded because I came from Kerio when we could call and get a person on the phone who worked on the product. Every tech had their own demo setup. They had instant messaging capability with the developers. If we found a problem, then we could get a result for it quickly. Now, the product seems to be 24 hours. They have also gone to the model that if you need quicker support, then they now charge you additional for the exact same level of support that they used to give. I am assuming it's the exact same level of support that they say it is. I'm not paying extra for it. That's the biggest flaw with the product."
"I have had a few issues with HTTPS decryption. The solution also does not show the actual user's Internet usage."
"The product's technical support is not good as it used to be."
"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."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"The solution’s interface must be improved."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"The solution could improve by having centralized management and API support online."
"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."
"It was difficult to configure our web printer through the solution. This process could be easier. Additionally, integration with SD-WAN solution."
"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."
KerioControl is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 16 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 22 reviews. KerioControl is rated 8.0, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of KerioControl 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 Netgate pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". KerioControl is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and SonicWall TZ. See our KerioControl vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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