We performed a comparison between pfSense and Untangle NG Firewall based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products received high marks from reviewers, but Untangle NG Firewall ultimately won out in this comparison. It is easy to set up, user-friendly and secure. In addition it has excellent customer support and is fairly priced.
"The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"Their proxy-based inspection is responsive and secure."
"The solution can scale well."
"The features that prevent internet connections, the filtering are the most valuable because we did not have any internet protection before."
"Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the different types of profiling. It has been the most effective for me. The WAF and the antivirus profile are the most effective in network protection."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"We like the fact that the product is open-source. It's free to use. There are no costs associated with it."
"Routing, load balancing, Traffic Limiter and queues. Since this company relies on an Internet connection, having these features is a must."
"It works. I put pfSense in, and it works. I can't think of any trouble I ever had with it. It runs on heat-sensitive appliances. They don't need a fan, so they don't overheat. It is affordable, fast, and very high-speed. It is built on BSD Unix, and it pretty much runs on any Intel processor."
"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."
"The initial setup was simple and fast."
"My company mainly works in the health and educational domain, schools and universities. I prevent the improper use of content from schools and universities. I defend the medical records for the patients in our hospitals. That is the main use case for me for the firewall."
"I especially like the VPN part. It works like a charm."
"I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection."
"The Untangle firewall is a software firewall, so it runs on generic hardware. We found that was probably the best feature, and it's why we chose it when we started using it three years ago."
"The product helps small and medium enterprises secure their networks from intrusions. It also has features like DNS blocking."
"All features are useful. We are using premium features such as bandwidth sharing, failover, web filters, SSL controls, antivirus, and VPN. We use these features to the fullest. These features are available in the paid firewall license, not the free one."
"The majority of our clients are very small businesses, and Untangle devices have been fantastic for these small clients. We've basically standardized our stack to just simply use Untangle. We include the hardware and the service option, which makes it very easy and affordable for us to just simply push that into the monthly per-user costing that we provide as a managed services provider. It's really a no-brainer. They're easy to use, and they're easy to set up and configure. Support is generally good about resolving any issues that we have. We haven't had any real complaints."
"The most valuable features are IPS, MAPI, NAT, and VPN."
"Application Control and filtering features are valuable."
"Web Filter is effective, Web Cache offers bandwidth savings, and the VPN setup is easy."
"NG Firewalls allow us to permit or deny applications we don't want to run. We also use content filtering, SSL inspection, and all the other things we run on the firewall to keep our clients protected and ensure they're not going where they shouldn't. It's a great firewall that works as intended."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"Scalability for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be improved. SD-WAN security for this solution also needs some improvement."
"They need to improve their technical support."
"In terms of areas of improvement, the interface seemed like it had a lot. The GUI interface that I had gotten into was rather elaborate. I don't know if they could zero in on some markets and potentially for small, medium businesses specifically, give them a stripped-down version of the GUI for pfSense."
"There's a bit of a learning curve during the initial implementation."
"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."
"Adjustment in the interfaces: I had to adjust those interfaces manually and of course that is a great feature that you can restore it but it is immediately also one point for improvement. If you don't have to adjust, if it's just stamped and it works, that's great."
"Needs services on additional features, such as managing inventory and generating reports."
"The solution could improve by having centralized management and API support online."
"Improve analysis of logs and dashboards (control panel) with improved alert functionality."
"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."
"The pricing is not as good as it was some time ago. They've since skipped offering a lot of individual features."
"We seek the availability of the hardware in our region. The hardware-based firewall from Untangle is currently not available in our region. It should have threat protection on a real-time basis. This feature, available in Check Point and Sandstorm kind of scenario, is currently missing in Untangle NG Firewall."
"Web-filtering policies could be improved."
"The biggest challenge that we have with this solution is local support. The local support is a problem in our area."
"For the web filter, I think they can do better especially on the free model."
"Whenever there are a large number of endpoint VPN clients, connectivity becomes slow."
"On their low-end appliance, they could have more memory and the largest storage space. The low-end appliance comes with a too-small hard drive, and it could use a little extra room. It only comes with about 4 gigs or 8 gigs of memory, and the hardware space is only 40 gigs, which is really small."
"The product needs to have a better support group for its online support, specifically for its help desk."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Untangle NG Firewall is ranked 23rd in Firewalls with 22 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Untangle NG Firewall 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 Untangle NG Firewall writes "Its simplicity, variety of features, and low pricing have enabled us to improve the security for our small business clients at a price that they are happy to pay for". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and SonicWall TZ, whereas Untangle NG Firewall is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, SonicWall TZ and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Untangle NG Firewall report.
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