We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiOS and Netgate pfSense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"The most valuable features are the possibility of having one fabric for switching on security."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"The product offers very good security."
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that it is good to use, and most importantly, the pricing. The customer especially likes the discount when they trade up or something like that."
"I like that the firewall gives me a lot of control in terms of outgoing and inbound traffic, and it scores better in deep packet inspections when compared with the Azure Firewall."
"The initial setup is straightforward, and it is very customer friendly."
"The solution is very user friendly."
"Compared to other firewalls, the segmentation is much easier in FortiGate."
"The customer service and support team are excellent."
"The most valuable features are the ease of use, and the overall simplicity, everyone can use it with a small introduction."
"The interface is easy to understand, so when there are threats you get alerts. It's quite intuitive, but if you are ever confused they have instructional videos. For example, if you don't understand a graph there's a link to a video that explains what the graph means. It makes it very user-friendly."
"This is an easy means of setting up high-availabilty firewall protection."
"My company mainly works in the health and educational domain, schools and universities. I prevent the improper use of content from schools and universities. I defend the medical records for the patients in our hospitals. That is the main use case for me for the firewall."
"I can manage it easily by myself."
"The solution is fairly scalable when it comes to integrating with other applications and data sets."
"What I like about pfSense is that it works well and runs on an inexpensive appliance."
"I handle the scanning for the finance department. I recently encountered an issue with the PCL bills, our company bills. I resolved the matter, cleared the bill, and received calls regarding it using pfsense.The user interface is extremely user-friendly, which is why we use it across various plant sites. Our IT representatives at the plants find it easy to use and manage because of its straightforward interface."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"Its reliability and cost-effectiveness stand out."
"We generally use it because it's cheap. When we need something more robust we use Barracuda and Sony Wireless Routers. For certain clients, we use pfSense because it's compatible with the VoIP platform."
"You do need some IT knowledge in order to effectively work with the solution."
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"While FortiGate is cheaper than most other solutions, we're seeing increased license renewal costs. Most of our clients are asking for more significant discounts because the price is going up."
"Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"FortiGate is really good. We have been using it for quite some time. Initially, when we started off, we had around 70 plus devices of FortiGate, but then Check Point and Palo Alto took over the place. From the product perspective, there are no issues, but from the account perspective, we have had issues. Fortinet's presence in our company is very less. I don't see any Fortinet account managers talking to us, and that presence has diluted in the last two and a half or three years. We have close to 1,500 firewalls. Out of these, 60% of firewalls are from Palo Alto, and a few firewalls are from Check Point. FortiGate firewalls are very less now. It is not because of the product; it is because of the relationship. I don't think they had a good relationship with us, and there was some kind of disconnect for a very long time. The relationship between their accounts team and my leadership team seems to be the reason for phasing out FortiGate."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"The pricing model makes this product far more expensive than similar solutions."
"Fortinet FortiOS need to manage its memory and CPU utilization better. It peaks at times, which sometimes can be challenging."
"It would be better if AWS instances were available. If I want to upgrade from T2.small to T2.medium, it should be available rather than having a big instance and paying a lot of money for that. The issue is that we had deployed in AWS Cloud, and we were using a very small instance. Recently we wanted to move in-house and deploy it on the big instance because it was struggling with the RAM. If we use T2.small, we cannot upgrade it to the T2.medium. It has predefined instances in the marketplace with a lot of cost differences. If I can increase the RAM, I have to choose the T3.large instance. If I'm paying $270 for the small instance, I have to pay more than double the cost for T3.large. It is about $850, and this is not good. So, it would be better if it was cheaper. I think both AWS and Fortinet should think about that. They should provide it on lower instances as well. If I want to upgrade it from T2.small to T2.medium, it should be available, but it's a problem."
"In the future I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards and a drop in the price."
"FortiOS doesn't work well with all browsers. I think they need to do a better job of making it compatible with the various browsers that are out there."
"The product needs a feature that allows users to create another site on a VPN."
"SD-WAN configuration could be easier."
"The solution's firmware updates have significant bugs and issues."
"I've never tried it in large environments. All my clients are small businesses with a handful of employees, so I am not sure how it works in large environments. I keep up with recent versions, and there's nothing I'm waiting for, and nothing breaks when I get a new version."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"One concern I have with Netgate pfSense is related to packet filtering. Specifically, issues can arise with certain functionalities like GP, and, at times, there may be bugs."
"There could be a way to remote to it through a mobile app. You can always browse through your browser on your mobile phone or tablet, but it would be good to have a dedicated app. I understand that iOS and Android developers are expensive, but there should be a mobile app."
"It requires more attention to provide a better alternative for open source to small government or educational institutions with reduced budgets in terms of technology."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"The GUI. There are TONS of plugins for pfSense, as such, if a user wants to add quite a bit of functionality, the GUI will feel a little congested."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
Fortinet FortiOS is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 73 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Fortinet FortiOS is rated 8.4, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiOS writes "Provides effective filtering features, good stability but initial setup is moderately challenging". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Fortinet FortiOS is most compared with Fortinet FortiManager, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Fortinet FortiWeb, Darktrace and OPNsense, whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Fortinet FortiOS vs. Netgate pfSense report.
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