We performed a comparison between Juniper SRX Series Firewall and OPNsense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Juniper SRX Series Firewall is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface, ease of use, and exceptional support. It boasts advantageous features such as site-to-site VPN functionality and a robust command line. OPNsense is appreciated for its scalability and remarkable features such as guest access capabilities and dashboards. Additionally, the availability of a free version is highly valued. OPNsense also offers features such as IDS and IPS, effortless configuration, and compatibility with pfSense.
Juniper SRX Series Firewall would benefit from enhancements in capacity limitations, reporting and alerts, user interface, device reliability, documentation, and feature enhancements. OPNsense needs improvements in the interface, bandwidth management, high availability, logging, integration, updates, IPS solution, hardware updates, installation, reporting, SSL inspection, and learning curve.
Service and Support: The customer service for Juniper SRX Series Firewall is highly regarded for its knowledgeable and supportive technical assistance. However, there have been occasional delays in response times. OPNsense's customer service has garnered both positive and negative feedback, with some users describing it as exceptional while others believe there is room for improvement.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Juniper SRX Series Firewall can be challenging and time-consuming, depending on the environment and integration needs. OPNsense provides a simple and quick setup that can be accomplished within a few hours, even by individuals without IT expertise.
Pricing: Juniper SRX Series Firewall has a relatively simple setup process, although configuring security settings may require additional time. OPNsense is a cost-effective open-source solution that does not necessitate licensing fees. However, there are associated expenses related to equipment, installation, resources, personnel, and training.
ROI: Juniper SRX Series Firewall provides reliability, consistent operation, and advanced security capabilities, leading to a favorable return on investment. OPNsense delivers a return on investment within a short timeframe of under three months and eliminates the need for ongoing payments.
Comparison Results: Juniper SRX Series Firewall is the preferred product in comparison to OPNsense. It offers a simple and fast setup process, a user-friendly interface, great support, and a wide range of useful features. Users appreciate its stability, scalability, and competitive pricing.
"Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"The SD-WAN function is very developed. It has SD-WAN functionality with security features in one device. We can manage from one single console SD-WAN and the security policy."
"The response is very quick and they can visually resolve our problems in a short period."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"I like how we can achieve total integration."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"The technical support is quite good."
"The solution is stable, inexpensive, and works well for medium size companies."
"The deployment is quite easy and fast."
"Juniper SRX Series Firewall is a stable solution."
"From a protection perspective, it provides a network perimeter security function for our company."
"It integrates well with Fortinet and Palo Alto."
"When compared to Palo Alto, Juniper is a better choice when it comes to the enterprise network and connectivity."
"The solution's stability is very good."
"What I like best about OPNsense is that, as a firewall, it's pretty good. I'm quite impressed with it. I had an excellent experience with OPNsense, which helped me achieve the targets I wanted."
"One of the most valuable features is the network checking. Additionally, the firewall and web filtering functionalities are highly useful."
"It is a very good solution. I like the dashboard. I can see what is going on and manage it as I like it."
"The initial setup is easy. It only takes 15-30 minutes to deploy."
"I have found the solution has some great features overall, such as guest access capabilities, dashboards, and ease of use. There is plenty of documentation and support and it has the plugins that I needed."
"The solution is good for a basic firewall for a small business or for home use."
"The most valuable features are reporting, the Sensei plugin, and firewall capabilities."
"The interface and the dashboard are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
"The solution's framework needs to be frequently updated in order to have a stable solution."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"Backup can be improved."
"For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"This solution needs to update for "Next Generation" needs."
"It would be good if Junos had "unique commands" between all hierarchical levels, discarding the use of the "Run" command."
"To compare with Fortinet, Juniper needs to improve their security features."
"The solution's initial setup process was lengthy as I was new to Juniper."
"I think improvement can be done to the security part, particularly the UDM, and the product should have a user-friendly interface similar to FortiGate. It should have the Azure RBAC in the next release."
"The solution's configurations and syntax are specific and more complicated than other platforms."
"JTAC (Juniper Networks Technical Assistance Center) is just okay for technical assistance. However, if you are used to Cisco TAC responsiveness, you will need to adjust your expectations with Juniper Networks TAC."
"The reporting is lacking."
"There are some add-ons that need enhancements to make management easier for users, especially the reporting features. Some reports don't show the level of detail I'm looking for, and I've had trouble installing certain add-ons, especially for Internet bandwidth shaping within my company."
"The IPS solution could be more reliable."
"Its interface should be a little bit better."
"I think the most important thing is that it should be easily accessible, but currently, that doesn't seem to be the case. We need a hardware platform that's based on common standards and open computing principles, which would be like a commodity and benefit us greatly."
"The user interface could be improved, and the DNS section should be more intuitive."
"They should improve IPEs for security in the future."
"We did not like the fact that you have to configure everything with the graphic user interface. We have used other firewalls, such as FortiGate, that you can configure via code. OPNsense is not easy to integrate. When you are deploying via GitHub or another source repository, this is not possible. That's one thing we didn't like much."
"While they do have paid options that actually gives better features, for most of the clients, if they tend to take a paid option will instead opt for Fortinet."
Juniper SRX Series Firewall is ranked 18th in Firewalls with 86 reviews while OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews. Juniper SRX Series Firewall is rated 7.8, while OPNsense is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Juniper SRX Series Firewall writes "Highly scalable, user-friendly UI, and easy to maintain". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". Juniper SRX Series Firewall is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos UTM, whereas OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and IPFire. See our Juniper SRX Series Firewall vs. OPNsense report.
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