Hillstone E-Series Reviews

We deploy the firewalls here in schools, in universities, in energy companies, so they like it very much.

They have their own call processor 64-bit. With the call processor, they're able to perform according to the load of the data volume that goes through these firewalls. 

The room for improvement would be the SSL VPN license cost. They're not cheap, that's the only problem. Those are a little more on expensive side, but again, not many would deploy Hillstone for SSL VPN, they use purely for file protection.

I've been using it for two to three years.

It's a very reliable solution.

The scalability is very good.

We have a lot support from Hillstone. We contact them when we have some unknown variable cases. They're very good. There are a few levels of tech support, so it depends on the nature of the problem, but most of the time, we can resolve issues on our own.

Comparing Barracuda with Hillstone, Barracuda is not a firewall. They're more like an accelerator or a web access firewall (WAF). Hillstone is not built to be a WAF, so we are comparing an apple an orange. It's very difficult for me compare because they're both very different products.

It's very easy to setup and easy to maintain. It's a quite straightforward implementation. Internally, we're trained by Hillstone to do the deployment on our own.

I would rate the ROI a five out of five because TCO is amazing. It does the job and the cost of maintenance is very affordable. To give you an idea, if we compare Fortinet with Hillstone and their different customers, normally after one year, or just before the year is up, we have to remind the Fortinet customer to renew their subscription. When we call them, they have to handle the price. It's very expensive. 

With Hillstone customers, they're quite different. Every year, instead of us going to them, they come to us and say, "Hey, we need to renew." After going through a round of renewals, they keep coming back to us for renewal. I ask them to renew for three years because it's cheaper, but they say no because they want to do it every year. 

These are two different kinds of customers who choose two different brands. That's the catch. With Hillstone, TCO and ROI are very good. It's an easy sale.

I would rate the E-Series a nine out of ten. 

If you want to go for value for money and don't go for the E-Series, the only advice I would give is upon purchase, get whatever base you need, or the bundle you need at three-year pricing. That way, the annual cost is very cheap. It's much cheaper than any of the competitors out there. Whether buying the first unit with a 12-month period, you buy one at first purchase with a 36-month period and your cost savings are expanded from there. That's the thing about the Hillstone, it is value for money in terms of a firewall. It is really, it does the job very well.

In fact, I think the founder of Hillstone was recently invited to be part of the Forbes Technology Council. You don't apply, you get to be invited to be part of the council and that was quite impressive. 

With the Apple iPhone, you see the iOS Apple IOS updates every now and then. There are a lot of security updates. The Hillstone team has contributed quite a number of reports to Apple in terms of vulnerabilities to their current iOS and Apple actually accepted those recommendations. They put those recommendations in the next iOS expression update.

The Hillstone team has actually contributed a fair bit to Apple in terms of all this. They're also a strategic partner with Microsoft, whereby Microsoft endorses Hillstone for the security of the Azure Cloud. It's one of a few partners. For five years in a row, Hillstone has also been on the Gartner chart as the best enterprise for firewall feature innovation.

I have been using Hillstone E-Series within the past 12 months.

We have been satisfied with the technical support for small and medium scale clients but we have not seen the support quality for the needs of enterprise organizations.

The installation is easy, we have not had any complaints from our customers.

The licensing model is very complex with many subcategories of licenses you can purchase. They could make it more simplified for customers to understand.

I have evaluated other solutions, such as Palo Alto and Check Point.

I rate Hillstone E-Series a seven out of ten.