We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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."Good anti-malware and web filtering features."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it."
"The most valuable features of the solution are SD-WAN, filtering testing applications, web filtering, and the new VPN."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"The main benefit is the grouping of our security monitoring."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"We like the fact that the product is open-source. It's free to use. There are no costs associated with it."
"It is effective. We have not had any problems."
"My technicians find the pfSense's web interface very useful. It is very easy to use. pfSense is very reliable and stable. We like the OpenVPN clients that can be deployed using pfSense very much."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"It is a stable solution. It is also easy to install and can be deployed and maintained by one team member."
"The built-in open VPN and the VPN Client Export are the solution's most valuable aspects."
"The initial setup was simple and fast."
"Routing, load balancing, Traffic Limiter and queues. Since this company relies on an Internet connection, having these features is a must."
"We can monitor the traffic manually and detect threats. Additionally, we can block different IP addresses and URLs."
"They now know the details about their network traffic that they did not know before: Applications that they are using and some application they did not know they were using."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the zero-trust security architecture."
"What I like about the VM-Series is that you can launch them in a very short time."
"The filtering feature is good."
"The VM-Series scalability is fast and easy to implement, improving our security posture as our Azure network grows."
"It is nice to have a rock solid security platform that we can count on."
"We now know a lot more detail about what our users are doing on the network."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"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."
"They need to improve their technical support."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"I haven't had a single issue since using Fortinet."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
"The product must provide integration with other solutions."
"Also, simplifying the rules for the GeoIP. Making it simpler to understand would be an improvement."
"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."
"It needs to be more secure."
"The main problem with pfSense is that we have to use proxy solutions."
"The interface is not very shiny and attractive."
"I would like to see different graphs available in the reporting."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is a complex product to work with."
"We have ran into issues with Palo Alto’s limitations for resolving large IP lists from DNS lookups, as well as the antivirus interfering with App-ID."
"From time to time, they have released some content updates that have some issues, maybe twice a year."
"I would like a way to do everything programmatically, or be able to copy the configs from different prices at different levels."
"On the cloud side, they need to come up with more HA solutions to support the multi-region."
"The utilization monitoring and GUI have room for improvement."
"I would like to have automatic daily reporting, such as how many users have connected via SSL VPN."
"The solution needs to have more easily searchable details or documentation about it online, so it's easier to Google if you have queries."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper vSRX. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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