"We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"When it comes to the integration among Cisco tools, we find it easy. It's a very practical integration with other components as well."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"I mostly like all of it. Whatever we use is valuable."
"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 is not complex."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"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 solution is fairly scalable when it comes to integrating with other applications and data sets."
"The two most valuable feature of Sophos XG is, one the option to filter according to different applications and two, the integration with the Active Directory."
"The product offers many great features."
"The most valuable feature is the central dashboard"
"The solution is very easy to use and straightforward."
"I like how you can integrate with other endpoints and Intercept X in one central management platform. I think it's a perfect solution. Sophos will manage everything in one container. You can manage many firewalls or endpoints within one panel."
"Overall the solution works well."
"The interface is user-friendly and the product is easy to configure."
"I have found configuring the ports to be easier in Sophos XG compared to the other devices."
"The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore."
"The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second."
"FirePOWER does a good job when it comes to providing us with visibility into threats, but I would like to see a more proactive stance to it."
"It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience."
"The price and SD-WAN capabilities are the areas that need improvement."
"They need a VTI. I know it's going to be available in the next software version, which is the 6.7 version. However, the problem with that is that the 6.7 is going to deprecate all the older IKEv1 deployment tunnels. Therefore, the problem is that we have a lot of customers which are using older encryptions. If I do that, update it, it's not going to work for me."
"The solution could offer better control that would allow the ability to restrictions certain features from a website."
"An area of improvement for this solution is the console visualization."
"The VPN feature of the solution could improve by adding better functionality and providing easier configure ability."
"The stability could be improved."
"The usage reports can be better."
"This solution is good for small businesses but it is not as stable as other competitors such as Fortinet."
"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."
"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."
"The router monitoring needs improvement when compared with Sonicwall."
"I tried pfSense, and it has a big issue with file system consistency, and this is what drove me to OPNsense. The file system stability is quite a big issue for us. We have a lot of outages related to power issues, and OPNsense is much more stable on this side."
"In the next release, I would like to see improvements to simplify the interface and more policy deployments."
"The UI needs improvement because it can be a little weird at times."
"For the moment, managing the Sophos interface is a little bit challenging."
"The solution could be more secure."
"I wish to see an antivirus feature added to the solution."
"In the Firewall, the Intrusion Prevention System can be improved."
"We are facing some technical issues with Sophos XG right now. We have already escalated this issue with the Sophos technical support. They seem to be working on it. We are satisfied with the technical support. They reply quickly to our queries, but sometimes take time upgrading their systems."
"The pricing can be high unless you choose a longer contract."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 60 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 130 reviews. pfSense is rated 8.6, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Light and stable with excellent real-time control ". pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos UTM, Untangle NG Firewall and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos UTM and SonicWall NSa. See our Sophos XG vs. pfSense report.
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