"It has very good features; it's easy to use, configure, set up, and deploy."
"They have very good technical support and I have relied heavily on them."
"It is easy to manage, which is one of the most important things for us. It is also flexible, stable, and scalable."
"Its ease of configuration and management is very useful for us and for other companies that don't have an onsite IT person. It is easy to configure and easy to manage. It is easy to configure the VPN with the Auto VPN feature."
"The technical support people from Meraki are brilliant."
"Meraki makes it easy to be secure and know where the holes are to fix them. We have been fixing anything that we have ever found for 20 years. We keep up-to-date with firmware upgrades. We just try to stay on top of everything for security, like maintaining updates and getting rid of old systems. I feel like we're on top of it."
"It has the most advanced security features, for example, layer 3 and layer 7 firewall capabilities and the end team and IPS protection. It also has IPS, and it has very good functioning of cloning services. You don't actually have to touch the device. If you have multiple companies in different countries, you don't really require this device to be touched. You can get it delivered directly to any office of a country, and then you can simply put your configuration over the cloud. It's very simplified and easy to manage. It gives a very good granular visibility about your network. Earlier, a lot of things were lacking in the network. We were unable to identify where the problem was, but after implementing Meraki MX, we are able to dig down and identify where is the problem. We can easily and quickly identify the sources and the root causes of the issues."
"Point-to-point VPNs can dynamically follow IP changes with no need for static IPs."
"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 flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"It is a stable solution. It is also easy to install and can be deployed and maintained by one team member."
"pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home."
"A free firewall that is a good network security appliance."
"The solution has good customization abilities and plenty of features."
"Good basic firewall features."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"You can only have one tunnel in the whole infrastructure — one tunnel with one device."
"In general, the SD-WAN feature needs to be improved. The load sharing and load balancing of the traffic should be improved. I have had some problems with these features in the past."
"As far as what needs to be improved — nothing really comes to mind. It does what we need it to do."
"When we do API integrations with Meraki, they have always been hard as well as tedious to build. The data that we want out of the API integrations has been only recently available. Six months ago, it was hard to get someone to build something correctly or useful with Meraki APIs. Recently, they have made more data available on the API, but it is just a start. They need to do more."
"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."
"They need to improve the link between Meraki and Active Directory."
"The security is not as strong as it could be"
"You cannot use switching behaviors as you see on the Meraki switch."
"Could be simplified for new users."
"If a user doesn't have a large amount of experience in Linux systems, they will have problems using this solution. Users need to be highly skilled in troubleshooting competency. Users who do not have such skills will find the product difficult to use."
"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."
"There are some bias issues and some intrusions in our network that have to be addressed. So, we're thinking of changing this firewall to something like a professional hardware-enabled firewall."
"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."
"There's a bit of a learning curve during the initial implementation."
"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."
"I have been using WireGuard VPN because it is a lot faster and more secure than an open VPN. However, in the latest version of pfSense, they have removed this feature, which is one of the main features that I need. They should include this feature."
Meraki MX is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 17 reviews while pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 60 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.4, while pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Makes it easy to stay on top of everything for security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". Meraki MX is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall, Sophos XG and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG and Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall. See our Meraki MX vs. pfSense report.
We monitor all Unified Threat Management (UTM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
