We performed a comparison between pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox 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 WatchGuard ultimately won out in this comparison. According to reviews, WatchGuard appears to be a more secure solution.
"ASA integrates with FirePOWER, IPS functionality, malware filtering, etc. This functionality wasn't there in the past. With its cloud architecture, Cisco can filter traffic at the engine layer. Evasive encryptions can be entered into the application, like BitTorrent or Skype. This wasn't possible to control through a traditional firewall."
"I have not contacted technical support. There is a lot of information on the internet for troubleshooting. All you need to do is use a search engine and you will find the information you are looking for easily."
"The management aspect of the product is very straightforward."
"I think Cisco ASA Firewall is the most stable firewall solution."
"Netting is one of the best features. We can modify it in different ways. Site-to-site VPN is also an awesome feature of Cisco ASA. The biggest advantage of Cisco products is technical support. They provide the best technical support."
"It is one of the fastest solutions, if not the fastest, in the security technology space. This gives us peace of mind knowing that as soon as a new attack comes online that we will be protected in short order. From that perspective, no one really comes close now to Firepower, which is hugely valuable to us from an upcoming new attack prevention perspective."
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"Cisco ASA Firewall is a well known product. They're always updating it, and you know what they're doing and that it works."
"pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"It is very easy to use. The interface is quite understandable. There is a good community, and I can take over at any time I want. If there is anything wrong with it, I could just reinstall the whole thing and start all over again, and I'll be up again in less than a few minutes"
"The features I have found best are ease of use, GUI, and performance."
"I have found pfSense to be stable."
"I am happy with the EPLS, the radius, and I am happy with the captive portal."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"It has a very nice web interface, and it is very simple to use. The way policies are working is also good."
"The most valuable features of the WatchGuard Firebox are all the security and updated features. You are able to configure the solution from the cloud platform and the application and web interface are very nice."
"What I found most valuable in WatchGuard Firebox is that it's a functional platform that works, and each of its features works well. The solution also has good reporting and dashboard capabilities. I also find the overall performance of WatchGuard Firebox great."
"The most valuable feature of WatchGuard Firebox is its ease of use."
"This product offers great protection using the default settings."
"The set up was quite straightforward and we handled it in-house. It took a few hours to deploy the product."
"There are many fantastic features."
"The ease of use is most valuable. You can quickly train someone who hasn't seen a firewall in life. You can get people up to speed, and in a few months, they are able to manage this product very easily. It is a very user-friendly, scalable, and stable product. Its price is also spot-on."
"Their support is excellent, and the stability is very good."
"We don't have any serious problems. The firewall models that we have are quite legacy, and they have slower performance. We are currently investigating the possibility of migrating to next-generation firewalls."
"I would like to see improvement when you create policies on Snort 3 IPS on Cisco Firepower. On Snort 2, it was more like a UI page where you had some multiple choices where you could tweak your config. On Snort 3, the idea is more to build some rules on the text file or JSON file, then push it. So, I would like to see a lot of improvements here."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"The access layer of this solution could be improved in terms of the way the devices interconnect with our network. We need to be able to analyze the traffic between the different interconnection in these areas."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"It can probably provide a holistic view of different appliances because many customers do not have only one brand, besides the traditional SNMP protocols, to cover all their devices. There are some specific requirements in terms of configurations or actions that sometimes have to be done in a very manual way because of the different versions or brands in a customer's infrastructure. It could also have some additional analytics capabilities. It has some very interesting ways to monitor the traffic and identify false positives from the architecture and the environment. It would be good if there is a way to patch with some other industry-specific solutions and synchronize some of the information, such as what other customers experience in their operations and probably share some additional information that could be leveraged or shared among the industry. Such information would be something interesting to see. It could have AI capabilities related to how the appliances could benefit from learning the current environment and different exposures."
"Cisco still has a lot of work to do. You can convert an ASA over to a Firepower, but the competitors, like Palo Alto and Juniper, are coming in. And believe it or not, they are a little bit more intuitive. Cisco has a little bit more work to do. They're playing catch up."
"In the next release, I would like to see the VPN and UTM features included."
"If you want to take advantage of all of the solution's options, you need to have a bit of a technical background. It's not for a layperson."
"We are at the moment looking to use it as a proxy service so that we can limit what websites people go and view and that sort of thing. That's an area I've struggled with a little bit at the moment and it could be a bit easier to set up."
"They can improve the dynamic of the input of IPs from outside."
"I would like to see pfSense integrate WireGuard. Currently, pfSense uses OpenVPN, and there's nothing wrong with it, but WireGuard is a lot leaner and meaner."
"The hotspot and the portal feature in this solution are not stable for WiFi access. We use it at least once or twice every day and it crashes. Some modules can be better by improving detection and having new updates. Additionally, we have some issues with clustering and load balancing that could improve."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"There could also be better reporting. For example, there should be more out-of-the-box management reports."
"The solution can improve by adding a feature to tag a MAC address of a computer system in the policy and more IP configuration settings."
"It's sometimes not easy to understand and can require specialist assistance."
"Some of the configuration options are somewhat confusing."
"The way Secure Sign-On authentication is happening needs to be improved. When the Secure Sign-On portal is turned on, anybody who comes into the campus, whether he or she is a staff member or a guest, has to go past the initial portal. One of the shortcomings is the username. It shouldn't allow permutations or combinations with upper or lower cases. For example, when there is a username abc, it shouldn't allow ABC or Abc. It should not allow the same username, but currently, two separate people can go in. Therefore, its authentication or validation should be improved, and the case sensitiveness should be picked up. If I have restricted someone to two devices, they shouldn't be able to use different combinations of the same username and get into the third or fourth device. It shouldn't allow different combinations of alphabets to be used to log in."
"What could use some significant improvement in WatchGuard Firebox would be its interface and policy management. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of WatchGuard Firebox is the ability to modify an existing policy instead of having to recreate a policy when changes are necessary. At the moment, there's no possibility to modify the policy. You have to delete the policy and recreate it."
"Its documentation could be improved. Sometimes, you need to search a bit longer to find what you are looking for."
"I would like to see more training become available for us."
pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 52 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 22 reviews. pfSense is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard Firebox 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 WatchGuard Firebox writes "Competent, basic front-end; the ports that I have assigned appear to be unattainable to outsiders". pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and KerioControl, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Meraki MX, Sophos UTM and OPNsense. See our WatchGuard Firebox vs. pfSense report.
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