KerioControl Reviews

We have our server in our head office, so we have offices that log into it from various other cities and run their accounting software on it.

We have several offices in different provinces across Canada and because of that, the connection has been very secure and reliable. We haven't had any downtime with it other than when we had the NG100 fail. Other than that, it's made the connection to our websites, our office, and our eCommerce sites all very reliable. That's been very important.

The most valuable feature is the reliability of VPN capabilities. The VPN has been very reliable and secure. The security has been very good and the VPN connections are reliable in that they stay up. We don't have a lot of problems with downtime and that type of thing.

The comprehensiveness of the security features is extremely good. 

Kerio offers everything I need in one product. 

The firewall and intrusion detection features are good. We've had some intrusion attempts that were stopped. The firewall has been doing extremely well for attempted hacks, as well as working well with the intrusion protection.

The VPN features are good They have a solid VPN client, which we found to be extremely good and reliable on various operating systems. Other than that, the VPN has been good. 

Kerio is extremely easy to use. They're easy to install and pre-configure. If you have to do any maintenance it's well handled through the system. Remote connection, logging in, and doing changes on the system is extremely well handled.

We do use the failover in our head office. The failover is working extremely well. The last test on that was May of 2000 and 2020. The failover seems to be working well and the security has been good, so they've felt very confident in having it up and working as it's supposed to be. It's configured as per the instructions and it's working really well.

Kerio has enabled us to double the number of VPN clients extended to those outside of our environment. It started a little bit before the pandemic but just because some of the companies started to work more from home to cut down on costs. But since COVID that's where it shows it's doubled.

One of the problems we do have causes problems with the VPN. The software slows the throughput down too much. You could have a one-gigabit connection from the internet, and it slows it down to where the area of upload and download is extremely slow. There's too much content filtering at that point.

Quality control is another problem that needs to be handled better, particularly in the NG100 series. We have had to replace a couple of those. Other than that, the throttling down of the speed is too much. It is too heavy.

Other than that, I think they're good. 

We first started with Kerio back in 2003.

We have an NG300, NG100, NG300W, and we still have a couple of 1120s.

Other than the quality of the NG100, stability has been extremely good.

The scalability has been extremely well handled. We can very quickly figure out what size of a machine a customer needs and put it into position.

We have four people that do them, but usually, when we're shipping out, one person sets it up and then they deploy it remotely and have the customer follow their instructions remotely.

We don't have plans to increase usage because of the problems we have encountered with the company and the follow-up. We would have. We had quite a few of them, I don't know an exact count anymore because it's changed over but even now we've still got about 32 of them in use right now. But we've switched over probably triple that away from it.

GFI's technical support is improving but at the very beginning, it was very bad. There was no way to contact them. When you did call, you didn't get returned messages. It is improving, but it's still not at a level where we're happy with it.

We previously used SonicWall. We were looking for something that was really rock solid. We had a very bad experience with SonicWall and their support was very bad. We had a client that was down and they couldn't and didn't help us. We had to find something else in a hurry. 

One of our technicians had been reading up on Kerio so we brought one of their machines in and configured it. That's one of the first ones he did and he said that the setup was really good. He installed it and got the client back up and running, and then we started looking into it and found it was much better. Strangely enough, shortly after that, the sales rep we were dealing with at SonicWall left and he went to Kerio also.

Something that really bothers us about GFI, is that as a partner or a reseller, they believe that the customers belong to them. As a reseller, we take a lot of time building trust and confidence with our clients. We've been in business 30 odd years, and we still have clients with us that we took on back 30, 32, 37 years ago. They're still our clients, they deal with us, and they trust us. SonicWall did it and now GFI does it. They insist on all of the contact information for our customers if we sell them a machine. Then they start direct emailing them and our clients start saying, "I hired you to take care of this, why are these people sending me all this junk?"

Plus, we're in Canada and they send out this information and emails and it has U.S. pricing on it. They make a big deal about that it's only $100 or something, and then by the time we convert it to Canadian, we're looking at $135 and the clients forget that very quickly. It's very misleading to clients. Our customers don't like it. That's one of the other reasons that we're moving everybody from Kerio, because of what GFI's policy is of insisting on having all of our customer's names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and everything else.

The initial setup is pretty good. The guys are used to it now. They've done a fair number of machines and they're very used to it.

It has become familiar and they're consistent from one model to another. The instructions are straightforward and a good tech should have no problem with it at all. The thing is that they're not a home machine, they're for business. If it has a tech working on it is no problem at all. It's quite simple.

An average deployment takes two and a half hours. 

Network engineers set it up. Even one of our web developers has set up some of them. They have been very happy with training other people to do them. They don't have any problems. It's quite simple. The engineer was the first one to start working with Kerio back when we took them on, and he found that even in the beginning, from learning on his own, it only took him about four to eight machines to feel confident that he could do it without having to follow the instructions every time.

The size of the companies we work with vary. We call them medium-size, but some of them are only one location with 5 to 20 employees. We host a lot of our e-commerce systems and clients have those on their machines so that when the e-commerce inquiries come in, they go through that router. They become a medium-sized business very quickly because of the amount of business they're doing.

Kerio is a good solution for companies of this size. It comes down to the same thing, reliable, cost-effective, the VPN connections are good for the security between the e-commerce sites. Our eCommerce site is dynamic, so it's connected between the customers' inventory, warehousing, shipping, and billing system, directly to the e-commerce site. It makes it a lot tighter and more security is required because they are connecting directly to the customers' business machines, as well as just e-commerce hosted sites. Reliability and security are very highly needed because it does run their e-commerce sites. 

We see ROI through the ease of setup. We have a flat fee for configuring one, we charge for one before we ship it out for installation or go and install it. A customer pays the retail price, converted to Canadian at the current exchange rate, and that's what we charge the customer for the machine based on Kerio's MSRP. Then we charge them a flat rate for configuring it, which is two hours and we charge them for two hours labor. Then we charge them for whatever time it takes to do it remotely on-site, or if we're going on-site and having to install it, we charge for that time. If you charge for your time and the value, then you're going to make a good return on it.

But if you go in undercutting prices, something has to suffer. We have never had a customer say to us that they're upset because we haven't taken care of them if they have a problem with one of the Kerio devices. There have been issues, they're machines, they're going to break down. But we've never had a customer say that it wasn't taken care of properly by us. When we had SonicWall that was a problem, we took care of the customer, we couldn't get the machine that he should have had properly under warranty, so we just went and got him a different machine, put it in and got him up and going.

That's where we have to charge for it. We did charge the customer for that, but he felt that we provided the service he needed. It just gave him a very bad taste in his mouth because he couldn't get it under warranty. Undercutting prices, either in your services or your pricing of the hardware is what's happening now on the internet, we see that people are buying Kerio cheaper. We say to them "If you insist on buying it and want us to install it, we're going to charge you to install it, and if there's a problem with DOA or anything like that, dead on arrival, that's up to you." We hand it back to them and say this machine's got a problem, you have to get it fixed.

The pricing is good. Our businesses have been around a long time and we've done that by not being the cheapest, but trying to be the best or one of the best. There's a lot of very good software and hardware companies out there, but a lot of them try to just undercut pricing and try to get the deal. We do not do that. We have a feeling we know what the value of our product is, if it's our own product. In a case where we have a router system, we know the value of it, we know what the value of the software licensing is for renewal and for the initial startup. We look at those things at the beginning, and we felt that Kerio was well in line. The price seems to be going up now, it hasn't gone up as bad as some of its competitors yet, but we'll keep an eye on that. Right now the pricing is valid for the product and the service they get.

We did look at and we're also an authorized Cisco reseller, but they're doing the same thing as SonicWall now. These big companies forget who puts all the work in. What they're trying to do, in my opinion, is get the little reseller to go out and hire the right people and go out and move their product, get them installed, and then they want to start going to them directly. I understand that smaller companies come and go but we've been here 37 years in total. They shouldn't go to our customers and start trying to direct sell to them and that type of thing. 

We were also a Dell reseller and we quit because we had to register every sale with them, and then they were going direct to the customers. It's not fair to the company that's gone out and done all the work.

The machine is a good value for the price and the software is extremely good value for the price. It's proven out to be good, but we're just disappointed in the company that now owns it and took over from it. They're improving, but it took too long to improve and it cost us a lot of money in that way. But I can't blame it on Kerio, I have to blame it on GFS.

I would rate Kerio Control a nine out of ten. 

Our biggest customer uses Kerio Control as a VPN on a campus network that we use to encrypt all of their heating and air. It's at the University of Mexico. It controls all of their heating, air, and security over their campus network. I have a hundred units doing that.

I'm a one-person team, and Kerio Control has saved me time. When I looked at the comparison between how much time I spend supporting a business installation of Kerio versus a FortiGate installation, just with the implementation, I have saved a few weeks of time. On a yearly basis, I have saved around 30 to 40 hours on one customer because they're bigger customers.

The VPN is the most valuable feature. We filter out outgoing NAT packets by port. So we locked down incoming and outgoing packets with the Kerio software. It's a lot less money than our FortiGate solutions that we installed, for instance. The value in it is money savings and flexibility.

Kerio is a lot clearer to set up to do particular things, whereas when I do it on a Cisco or a FortiGate I have to go fight with it per week sometimes to do something I can do in 20 minutes on Kerio.

For the money, the comprehensiveness of the security feature is exceptional. The next level of security is the sandbox and FortiGate charges me $120,000 a year for that sandbox. I don't see that as something that Kerio would ever be adding. The next step is a big, drastic step up in company size. So for medium and small businesses, I think Kerio is about as good as I can get.

It gives us everything we need in one product for our small-size business.

For medium to small businesses, the firewall and intrusion detection features are very well priced and just excellent. The functionality for the amount that we're paying for them is excellent.

The malware and antivirus features are okay. I add stuff on top of Kerio, I have Malwarebytes. So I would give it an okay. Malwarebytes still catches quite a bit that Kerio doesn't.

I used the content filtering a little bit and it works alright. I've got a hundred VPNs at the University of New Mexico. I don't put it anywhere else though, so I don't know. I don't really have any kind of input on that, I suppose.

Their graphical user interface that allows me to open up particular ports to particular internal IPs with one external IP is very flexible and easy to use. It is also much clearer than when I go into my larger systems with two competitors, Cisco and FortiGate.

Kerio enables me to use one external IP address to cut it into multiples server solutions based on different port numbers. It saves them money if my customers are creative enough to use those features.

The overall speed needs improvement. Internet connectivity speed needs to be improved somehow.

If I buy one of Kerio's hardware boxes and put it between me and the Internet, the speed is reduced dramatically using their hardware.

I have been using Kerio Control for the last twenty years. 

We currently have one on Macintosh and one on Windows of the most current version of Kerio Control as well as Kerio Connect.

I found it to be fairly stable. Their updates have gone very smoothly, which is a nice thing. It doesn't crash during updates. I've had very good luck with that. Whereas I can't say the same thing with both Cisco and FortiGate.

If you buy their hardware box, it doesn't scale so nicely. I found if I put it on a higher-end computer, it does better. I guess it's okay if you put the right hardware in for it. I can't get through those to their boxes.

I had some customers that were running about 200 to 300 machines, those were my larger ones with Kerio. For the most part, I have them on between five and 20 users.

One of my customers had some issues that weren't pleasant. Support was pretty good and then it changed quite a bit when Lifeboat and GFI were involved. I personally haven't done too bad. I'm a one-person show, but I have a bunch of subcontractors. I personally have done alright with them. Although some of my people have had some not as good experiences over the last six months. They had time-related issues, about how long it took them to get back to them.

On average, it takes around one to two hours on a small to medium business to set it up. But it's totally dependent on their applications and that can vary up to quite a few hours if they've got some complex application issues. Typically, it's because I have to wait on getting responses from vendors. So we go out and we put in a default setup and modify off of that.

Our default setup pretty much locks their network up to only having HTTP, it turns off FTP and things of that nature. We have a pretty secure default setup and then we go open things.

After you've done it a few times it's pretty smooth.

Our ROI is money savings. We bill them every year for their renewal subscriptions, and that goes fairly smoothly. We don't have to spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to add a particular port or interface for a new function that the client needs to have access to. They never need the Internet. It takes us considerably less time to do it on Kerio than it does on the competing products that we also deal with. Which, from our perspective, is appropriate. For some people, it would be a mixed blessing because you are not getting as much billable time out of it, but we like to be as efficient as possible and so we appreciate that. We feel it's a good return on investment.

I think that licensing flows pretty smoothly. Make sure that you set them up so you support them over the my.kerio.com web interface because that lets you see all of your customers.

We don't use high availability or fail-over protection. We set one up once and almost gave up on it. You have to have pinnacle boxes and things, so we did set it up and test it but we haven't actually sold any of them.

I feel pretty comfortable having a Kerio firewall in a medium to small business. It can be deployed in an easy fashion, which is the same as everybody's Comcast, CenturyLink, or whatever their modem has. Then if you really spend the time doing it correctly, you can give somebody what, I feel, is an enterprise-quality solution in small business for a good price.

If I pinhole Kerio for small businesses, I would rate it a 10 out of ten but overall, I would give it a seven.

We primarily use the solution on the VPN for protection purposes. We utilize its antivirus capabilities as well.

I really like their general IT.

I like how it's possible for me to block other countries immediately if I see the need to do so.

The initial setup is a breeze.

The support the solution offers needs a lot of improvement. GFI took over the product and since the takeover, the support, the backups, the after-sales support, etc., has basically dropped off quite a bit.

When it comes to dealing with updates, there are often bugs on the solution. They should do a lot more testing before they release new versions.

I've been using the solution for about five years now.

The solution is very stable. Organizations won't have to worry about the solution crashing. I consider it to be very reliable. We have only had one firewall go down in the five years we've been using it, and I can't recall any other problems.

That said, when it comes to major updates, they need to do a lot more testing before they release things. Last year there had been a lot of bugs in major releases. It may have been because of the takeover. GFI has since taken over the brand.

The solution is pretty scalable. I updated it about two years ago and I didn't have trouble scaling. A company shouldn't have any problems expanding it.

Technical support is not the best. As an example, this past weekend I had an issue. It took me four days to get a hold of their support team. I'm a premium client. I tried everybody: America, Germany, UK, Africa. Everybody. That's unacceptable. There is no reason that their response should be that slow. In the past, I had managed to resolve issues quickly. That's not the case anymore. We're very dissatisfied with the level of service they are providing their clients.

I've previously come across Barracuda. I've spoken to the team there. In terms of meeting our needs, I've found that, with a lot of other products, it's very modular. Kerio tends to keep everything in-house. Due to that, there are certain functionalities that I prefer to have with Kerio as opposed to other solutions.

The fact that the setup is so easy is one of the solution's great selling points. It's straightforward. It's not complex at all.

It only takes one person to deploy and maintain the solution. The deployment itself only takes about an hour or two. Looking at the branches, it may just be 10-15 minutes of work for them. It's pretty quick. Of course, it depends on how many walls. A super basic setup is 10-15 minutes, however, if you have to put in a lot of rules, it will take longer because that process takes time.

I handled the implementation myself.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I would recommend the solution. It doesn't take too many people to set it up or maintain it, like, for example, Cisco, which is a bit more complex and difficult.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten, and that's mostly due to the fact that their support is so awful right now. If their support was better and more reliable, I would rate them much higher.

My primary use case is to route traffic and route our multiple Internet interfaces. It routes all of the outbound Internet traffic, none of the internal. I do apply a content filter as well to make sure people aren't going into places that they shouldn't be. We have some traffic rules setup for certain services, blocking certain IP ranges from getting external access as well. We do the same for the Adelaide office, but our South Coast office, in addition to all of that, we also run DSCP off of it. The South Coast is the only place we use the DSCP on Kerio.

Now that we're both running fiber connections between Sydney and Adelaide, I can access our document server in Adelaide just from my PC, rather than using something like TeamViewer and transferring the file I'm after via TeamViewer from Adelaide. I get to it not much slower than the internal server we have right now. It's fantastic.

The routing of the multiple Internet physical routers I have is the most valuable feature of this solution. Instead of me physically unplugging a cable from one router to the server, if one connection goes down, it automatically switches for me. So I can have all three of them plugged in. If one goes down, it just picks up the other one automatically. There's no physical cable swapping.

In terms of ease of use, it's pretty easy. It took some playing around for me to understand some of it, but I'd say if you understand what it is you're after, and how that works, then this is pretty easy.

We use the firewall. It's fine, a bit tough. I need to test it against others. I'd rather use the Kerio firewall than the Windows ones.

With the VPN features we can connect all three of our sites together.

The content filtering and VPN features are pretty easy to set up. It's a couple of clicks and it's done, so it's pretty good. I'm pretty happy with it.

I am the only manager who manages the security. It does save me time. In the scenario where one Internet connection goes down, I used to have to run to the server room and unplug a cable, and come back. Now, I don't have to do that at all. It saves me a lot of time, 100%. With the routing, previous to this there are a few things in here that I haven't had the ability to really do how I wanted so I don't have a comparison.

I would like it if the interface section had multiple failovers. Although I do have three connections, just in case our physical cables get disconnected, I can only set up one failover as a backup. So, if for some reason our fiber and our AFM went down together, I would have to have it search for our 4G modem. I'd love to have extra backups running.

Someone set a printer to have a static IP address and because they set it as static, it won't show on my LAN, on the DSCP server, because it's not questioning it. So just because the device does not request the rules from the DSCP, I don't see why it wouldn't show up in my LAN on the DSCP server. That's a bit odd. It's different from how a Windows DSCP server would react. Instead of only showing one is requesting DSCP, or on a reservation, it shows all, whether they're reserved or not. A Windows one would. For some reason, it isn't showing me ones that were statically assigned.

I have been using Kerio Control for four to five years. 

It's deployed in three different locations now. 

The stability is pretty good. I've only had one issue with it before. It was set to update on its own, and it didn't update and the update failed, so it didn't come back on for some reason.

If an update fails, it should have some kind of automatic rollback to bring itself back on. Because when it does that at night and it stops, I don't really get a notification that it's stopped. It's not on anymore so I don't find out that nothing has worked all evening until the next morning.

Scalability is fantastic. I don't see a limit to it.

I am the only admin for this solution.  

We employ a company that contracts stuff out for me, so they're the people that initially installed this for me at the three sites, but I maintain it. If I have other things I don't know how to do, they'll get in, but it's just me and that other team.

Increasing usage depends on whether the business itself acquires other businesses, and that's really why we've got these three locations. We bought a business in Adelaide, so we set up a similar setup to what we had in Sydney. And this year in February we bought another business down in the South Coast of New South Wales and we've set up a similar thing there as well. So if we buy other businesses and I need some other help with the server running, then yes, I'll probably get another license. But only if that happens.

My business is medium-sized and this solution is perfect for it. 

I have one point of access for multiple portions of what I need for routing. We've got an Internal server that's managed by a different company and it was incredibly easy for that other company to put certain rules in place and then for us to create those rules to and communicate to the outside world was incredibly easy to map. There was just no confusion between the two companies that we're talking about what to map. That was in the initial setup, so that all wasn't done by me. They just communicated to each other very easily. This made it very simple. There was no confusion.

I've never contacted technical support because I just call the people that I contract to fix things and if they're not quite sure how to fix something, they'd probably contact GFI. 

We used to use a Cisco router. That was it. There was a very limited amount of routing I could really perform.

Kerio Control enables us to add multiple routing. We have lots of different options in the one thing. 

Kerio was recommended to me by ITIS. They told me that this one was what they highly recommended we use for what I needed.

The outsourced contractor that we used for the setup was great. There's nothing wrong. I've been using him for a while.

I can't imagine not using it. I think if I had to use the Microsoft server to do all of this I'd be very frustrated.

I don't have other ones to compare the pricing to. I haven't used other solutions to know all the features they have. The price seems reasonable to me for something that does so much and works so well.

Kerio Control has not increased the number of VPN clients but we have added clients only because they needed it, not because Kerio is there.

To the best of my knowledge, before Kerio we did not experience a security breach. The only semi security issue we had was that someone had run a virus that encrypted a whole bunch of files on the server. But that was before my time. I was not the IT manager at that point.

If I didn't have the help from someone else that completely understood all of the services that are features of this product, then I probably wouldn't have put it in myself. It's definitely more advanced for people that are handling this type of networking day to day, which I don't. The only other thing that I've had a problem with is Apple servers for some reason, because Apple services come through on so many different servers themselves, and different destinations on the Internet, there's always some kind of issue with updating them on the network with Kerio running. I don't know why. It's just Apple. Everything else is fine.

Personally, I've just learned how to route traffic over a network well. It's helped me to route different parts of the Internet to different parts of my network, which I can't do on a Window server, and visually it's been a great help.

It's been able to add multiple Interfaces, it's good. I have multiple Internet streams and a failover. That's the best.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I have had a few issues with HTTPS decryption. The solution also does not show the actual user's Internet usage. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

I did not face any issues with stability while using the tool's trial version. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

Primarily, I use Kerio Control as a firewall and for web-filtering user controls.

The filtering on the unlicensed version of Kerio Control is inefficient - you have to add each website manually, which isn't feasible. It also has no anti-spamming feature for emails.

I've been working with Kerio Control for four years.

Kerio Control's stability isn't good.

Kerio Control can be scaled easily.

The initial setup was very simple and took one or two days - it's on a Linux-based machine, so we just got the setup files and installed it. 

We used an in-house team.

I would give Kerio Control a rating of six out of ten.

We use it for our data plan. We are using its latest version.

The firewall and the content filtering options are valuable.

There isn't a lot to be improved. It works well as it is, but they can maybe improve the reporting side.

We have been using this solution for about five years.

It is pretty stable. We don't have any issues.

It scales easily without a challenge. We have about 400 users, but administrators directly work with it.

It was pretty straightforward. It took about an hour.

We deployed it ourselves.

Its licensing is yearly. You renew every year. Its price is all-inclusive.

It works well. I don't have a problem with how it works. I am also fine with its deployment, but it can be challenging if you don't have someone skilled or trained. If you have the skills, its deployment would be straightforward. You would be able to deploy it without a challenge. So, you just need to find the right person to deploy it.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We are working with VMware and we are using virtual machines for Kerio Control.

The most valuable features of Kerio Control are the IPS and traffic rules. The traffic rules are very user-friendly and the IPS is working well. Additionally, the anti-virus is effective with quick options, such as filtering.

Kerio Control could improve by having higher availability and adding a mobile VPN channel. These additions are needed. The VPN is working fine on the Kerio Control but there needs to be a VPN client on the mobile phones, both for iOS and Android. This would be very good for us.

In a future release, SD-WAN features would be very useful.

I have been using Kerio Control for approximately seven years.

The solution is stable. However, we have had some problems, and we want to receive some updates for the IPS module. Sometimes we have errors downloading the IPS updates.

I have not contacted technical support. When I have an issue I search the internet and solve the problem. When I search Google, I find solutions for my problem.

Previously I was using OPNsense and pfSense. However, Kerio Control is more user-friendly and stable than pfSense and OPNsense.

The deployment of Kerio Control was easy and user-friendly. We have no problems deploying the Kerio Control, Kerio Portal, and Kerio Connect for our customers.

I am living in Iran and we cannot buy the product from Kerio because of sanctions.

I rate Kerio Control an eight out of ten.