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.
"I like that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is reliable. Support is also good."
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"With Cisco, there are a lot of features such as the network map. Cisco builds the whole network map of the machines you have behind your firewall and gives you insight into the vulnerabilities and attributes that the host has. Checkpoint and Fortinet don't have that functionality directly on the firewall."
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"Cisco's technical support is the best and that's why everybody implements their products."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"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."
"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."
"I have found the most valuable features of Kerio Control to be the IPS and firewall."
"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 installation is straightforward."
"The firewall and the content filtering options are 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."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It is hard to get a domain."
"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."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"It has a very nice web interface, and it is very simple to use. The way policies are working is also good."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"At our peak time, we have reached more than 5,000 concurrent connections."
"pfSense is easy to use, has user-friendly dashboards, and useful blocking features."
"pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home."
"The built-in open VPN and the VPN Client Export are the solution's most valuable aspects."
"I'm the expert when it comes to Linux systems, however, with the pfSense, due to the web interface, the rest of the staff can actually make changes to it as required without me worrying about whether they've opened up ports incorrectly or not. The ease of use for non-expert staff is very good."
"One of the few things that are brought up is that for the overall management, it would be great to have a cloud instance of that. And not only just a cloud instance, but one of the areas that we've looked at is using an HA type of cloud. To have the ability to have a device file within a cloud. If we had an issue with one, the other one would pick up automatically."
"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."
"I would like to see improvement when you create policies on Snort 3 IPS on Cisco Firepower. On Snort 2, it was more like a UI page where you had some multiple choices where you could tweak your config. On Snort 3, the idea is more to build some rules on the text file or JSON file, then push it. So, I would like to see a lot of improvements here."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"The maturity needs to be better."
"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."
"It would be great if some of the load times were faster."
"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."
"My experience with the solutions technical support is fine but they could be faster in responding."
"There isn't a lot to be improved. It works well as it is, but they can maybe improve the reporting side."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Kerio Control could improve content filtering."
"They don't provide content filtering when it comes to search engine results. We had an incident on the network where a blocked site was showing up in search results. We are in a school environment, so we have blocked a site with some of the explicit content so that kids wouldn't see it. When one of them did a search, the results came on the search engine part. When you try to drill down to the website, it blocks, but when you search by image, it brings up all the images. That's one of the reasons why we are looking at Juniper."
"The filtering on the unlicensed version of Kerio Control is inefficient - you have to add each website manually, which isn't feasible."
"Many people have problems setting up the web cache for the web system."
"It needs to be more secure."
"The usage reports can be better."
"The stability could be improved."
"The technical support needs to be improved."
"I would like to see pfSense integrate WireGuard. Currently, pfSense uses OpenVPN, and there's nothing wrong with it, but WireGuard is a lot leaner and meaner."
"The access control aspect of the product could be improved."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
KerioControl is ranked 17th in Firewalls with 12 reviews while pfSense is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 58 reviews. KerioControl is rated 7.8, while 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 pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". KerioControl is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM and Cisco ASA Firewall, whereas pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and Check Point NGFW. See our KerioControl vs. pfSense report.
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