We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Smoothwall Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"We can use our devices to check all of the perimeters. It secures email websites."
"Offers good security and filtering."
"FortiGate SD-WAN facilitated a smooth transition for our customers between their two internet service providers, ensuring uninterrupted connectivity without any downtime."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution."
"We are a visual effects company, and there have been a number of high profile security issues in our industry. This has brought us to a higher standard of security, which our clients are very keen on these days."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"I have found pfSense to be stable."
"The solution is fairly scalable when it comes to integrating with other applications and data sets."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"Creation of certificates and the facility to administer services are valuable features."
"The solution is very robust."
"Firewall system for small, medium, and large data networks. It allows you to provide security to your environment: DMZ networks, LAN, WAN, etc."
"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."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"It was easy to initially deploy it."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"The routing capability on the FortiGate devices has room for improvement."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"They've become quite expensive."
"I would like Fortinet to add more automation to FortiGate."
"The technical support needs to be improved."
"The product must provide integration with other solutions."
"There are several levels of firewall configuration such as beginner, advanced, and expert configurations. At each level, it becomes more complex and more tricky to set up the firewall. For example, if you want to install the firewall on your computer system, it would be a lot easier if it just tells you that this is the internet NIC and this is the Wi-Fi NIC."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"There is more demand for UTMs than a simple firewall. pfSense should support real-time features for handling the latest viruses and threats. It should support real-time checks and real-time status of threats. Some other vendors, such as Fortinet, already offer this type of capability. Such capability will be good for bringing pfSense at the same level as other solutions."
"We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"Web interface could be enhanced and more user friendly."
"There is room for improvement in the UI. They can improve it by making it so that everything is in one place, so we don't have to jump around to different pages."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Smoothwall Firewall is ranked 34th in Firewalls with 1 review. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Smoothwall Firewall is rated 9.0. 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 Smoothwall Firewall writes "Offers good scalability and monitoring features ". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Smoothwall Firewall is most compared with OPNsense.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls 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.
