"The most valuable feature that Cisco Firepower NGFW provides for us is the Intrusion policy."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"Web filtering is a big improvement for us. The previous version we used, the AC520, did not have that feature included. It was not very easy for us, especially because the environment had to be isolated and we needed to get updates from outside, such as Windows patches. That feature has really helped us when we are going outside to pull those patches."
"I like that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is reliable. Support is also good."
"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."
"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."
"The features I've found most valuable are the packet captures and packet traces because they help me debug connections. I like the logs because they help me see what's going on."
"A good intrusion prevention system and filtering."
"I like the connectivity to the open VPN. It's very smooth."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"The initial setup was simple and fast."
"The flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"The interface is straightforward and easy to use."
"I'm the expert when it comes to Linux systems, however, with the pfSense, due to the web interface, the rest of the staff can actually make changes to it as required without me worrying about whether they've opened up ports incorrectly or not. The ease of use for non-expert staff is very good."
"The documentation is very good."
"I especially like the VPN part. It works like a charm."
"The solution can scale well."
"The price and SD-WAN capabilities are the areas that need improvement."
"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."
"Cisco makes horrible UIs, so the interface is something that should be improved."
"Cisco Firepower is not completely integrated with Active Directory. We are trying to use Active Directory to restrict users by using some security groups that are not integrated within the Cisco Firepower module. This is the main issue that we are facing."
"Its interface is sometimes is a little bit slow, and it can be improved. When you need to put your appliance in failover mode, it is a little difficult to do it remotely because you need to turn off the appliance in Cisco mode. In terms of new features, it would be good to have AnyConnect VPN with Firepower. I am not sure if it is available at the moment."
"The application detection feature of this solution could be improved as well as its integration with other solutions."
"FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
"The solution could use better reporting. They need to offer more of it in general. Right now, the graphics aren't the best. If you need to provide a report to a manager, for example, it doesn't look great. They need to make it easier to understand and give users the ability to customize them."
"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."
"The interface is not very shiny and attractive."
"The integration should be improved."
"They could improve their commercial stance and be more agile when it comes to the commercial pricing of enterprise deals."
"It needs to be more secure."
"Could be simplified for new users."
"Sometimes it reboots when you least expect it, and that's the main issue."
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pfSense is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 58 reviews while Zyxel Unified Security Gateway is ranked 9th in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 1 review. pfSense is rated 8.6, while Zyxel Unified Security Gateway is rated 3.0. 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 Zyxel Unified Security Gateway writes "Low cost but unresponsive technical support and very unstable performance". pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and Check Point NGFW, whereas Zyxel Unified Security Gateway is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, WatchGuard Firebox, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Fortinet FortiOS.
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