We performed a comparison between Meraki MX 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: The main difference between the two solutions is that Meraki MX is expensive, while pfSense is an open-source solution and is free of charge. In addition, Meraki’s monitoring capabilities could use improvement.
"The Fortinet FortiGate local partners were good. I did not have direct contact with Fortinet support."
"The pricing is great and very reasonable."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."
"Their interface is very easy to use, it is without bugs."
"I like that you are able to manage FortiGate from the FortiManager to create a more centralized environment."
"Overall security features and performance routing is good."
"Point-to-point VPNs can dynamically follow IP changes with no need for static IPs."
"Since it has an integrated dashboard for all the products, customers can get complete network analytics regarding what the user is doing, monitoring, and observing."
"Ease of management is the best thing about the solution."
"MX is easy to manage, configure and install."
"Easy to deploy with a simple configuration."
"It's flexible, easy to configure, and easy to manage."
"To me, the analytics feature is one of the most valuable in Meraki MX. I also find that it has good usability as it's cloud-based. Another valuable feature of Meraki MX is that it's simple to use and it's user-friendly."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"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."
"Sophos Intercept X is scalable. Currently, we have almost 30 people using it in our company."
"The product’s documentation is good."
"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 reports and how I can control access to the policies on the firewall."
"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."
"It is a very good solution for enterprises that need a VPN for their employees. It is the best way to provide a remote work facility to employees at a very low cost. Other solutions that I have had in the past were very expensive. Enterprises don't always have that kind of money to invest."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"From a reporting perspective, there's room for improvement. They're providing FortiAnalyzer through which one can get some enhancements, but the visibility and reporting still need slight improvement."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"The support we receive when we need to upgrade is not satisfactory and has room for improvement."
"It is very expensive."
"Meraki has some hidden features and information that is only privy to their engineers. If that information became available to us, then it would improve our ease of management, and we would be able to make certain adjustments instead of having to go to them."
"The solution's pricing should be reduced."
"An area for improvement in Meraki MX is that it needs some provision, as supplying the unit through Cisco can be tedious at times, but as far as the product itself and its offerings, Meraki MX is five-star all the way."
"The configuration options for firewall and IPS have limitations."
"They're very complacent and I find the rule set to be a little arcane."
"Meraki tech support staff have a lot more visibility into your network than you do, which is frustrating at times. I understand the approach is to keep the dashboard easier to understand. This will frustrate more advanced users at times."
"We have been having a problem with the VPN. When the energy goes down and is back again, the VPN link doesn't get established. We have to manually turn off the modems and other pieces of equipment and manually establish the VPN. It has been around one month since we have been having this problem, and we don't have enough support from Meraki to solve the problem."
"Ease of use is a problem for a user who is unfamiliar with this product because, in the interface, everything has to be set manually."
"Other solutions provide more scope for growth. For instance, we can have only 10 to 20 employees on VPN, but other solutions can support more users. We also have more capabilities to increase the performance of the solution."
"The solution could be more user-friendly, and the graphical interface needs some work so that someone without an IT background can use the application. I would like the ability to manage the on-premise appliance from the cloud. When I'm not in the office, it would be great to connect to the pfSense server and administer the network remotely."
"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."
"The solution could improve by having centralized management and API support online."
"The solution’s interface must be improved."
"There could be a way to remote to it through a mobile app. You can always browse through your browser on your mobile phone or tablet, but it would be good to have a dedicated app. I understand that iOS and Android developers are expensive, but there should be a mobile app."
"Also, the GUI is helpful, but it's not user-friendly. It's complicated. It should be more intuitive for the average user and have an excellent graphical view. Of course, the user will typically know about network administration, but it still should be easy to understand."
Meraki MX is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 21 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 22 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 7.8, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Provides good visibility, easy to configure and manage, and good for small businesses". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". Meraki MX is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, SonicWall NSa and SonicWall TZ, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and Azure Firewall. See our Meraki MX vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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