We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs. We have scaled already from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers."
"The threat prevention is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"Whenever we raise a complaint with FortiGate, their response and resolution times are minimal."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"The FortiGate controls the user's activities and maximizes my bandwidth use overall."
"The GUI is good."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"The intrusion detection feature is the most valuable. It is an open-source firewall, so there is a lot of material on it. I also find the open VPN capability very nice. It is pretty customizable. The clustering and the high availability are the two biggest things to be able to get out of a firewall."
"The performance and functionality are good."
"The solution is very robust."
"The classic features such as content inspection, content protection, and the application-level firewall, are the most important."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"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 most effective features of the solution for threat prevention are Layer 7 inspection, SSL decryption, IPS, and the web filtering profile."
"The solution strengthens our IT posture."
"The feature that I have found the most useful is that it meets all our requirements technically."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series's most valuable feature is the visibility of the environment."
"Centralized management is valuable because it allows us to configure settings in one location and apply them across all three locations."
"The VM-Series reports how much bandwidth a particular IP is using. You don't need to regularly log into a website, like a Cisco command, to see what kind of ACL it's getting. There isn't an ACL use portal event. You can go there and see how much my ACL has been getting me."
"What I like about the VM-Series is that you can launch them in a very short time."
"You already can scale it if you put it in Auto Scaling groups. If you put it in a load balancer, it should already be able to scale."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"As far as wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you."
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"The pricing could always be better."
"Performance and technical support are the main issues with this solution."
"The Wi-Fi controller needs a lot of improvement."
"The reporting in Fortinet FortiGate could improve. Customers are having to purchase additional reporting components. When I have used the Sophos solution it is a complete solution, in Fortinet FortiGate you have to use additional tools to have the features needed."
"As an open-source solution, there are so many loopholes happening within the product. By design, no one is taking ownership of it, and that is worrisome to me."
"The product must provide integration with other solutions."
"pfSense could improve by having a sandboxing feature that I have seen in SonicWall. However, maybe it is available I am not aware of it."
"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."
"Web interface could be enhanced and more user friendly."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"It needs to be more secure."
"Also, simplifying the rules for the GeoIP. Making it simpler to understand would be an improvement."
"On the cloud side, they need to come up with more HA solutions to support the multi-region."
"It is not very easy to scale up the solution."
"The product's AIOps process needs improvement."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"The product could be better in terms of performance than one of its competitors."
"The only minor issue we've faced is with the app's ID configuration, which requires specific matching for application filtering."
"The solution must improve Zero Trust integration and use cases."
"There are various reports that come with the box or with the VMware, but you can only run them daily."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 52 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper vSRX. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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