We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and OPNsense 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."Customers want to load balance more than eight lines or six internet lines. FortiGate is the only solution that can accomplish this."
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"The most valuable feature is the FortiManager for centralized management."
"The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"It has very good features; it's easy to use, configure, set up, and deploy."
"The cloud management system is really valuable."
"The technical support people from Meraki are brilliant."
"It is easy to manage, which is one of the most important things for us. It is also flexible, stable, and scalable."
"Its ease of configuration and management is very useful for us and for other companies that don't have an onsite IT person. It is easy to configure and easy to manage. It is easy to configure the VPN with the Auto VPN feature."
"When you try to create an IP or when you have an alert about when a website is banned, these features are helpful."
"In a week, we can make new policy and view what all our users did."
"Both the scalability and the scalability are great with Meraki MX."
"What I like the most about OPNsense is that it offers an easy-to-use dashboard for device management and control."
"It's more secure and more reliable."
"The IDS and IPS features are valuable. From the usability perspective, there is a lot of good documentation. As IT professionals, we found it very easy to configure the firewall. It was easy to configure and use."
"The interface and the dashboard are the most valuable features of this solution."
"We have been operating here in our lab for several months, and everything appears to be extremely stable."
"The most valuable feature is the Dual WAN in OPNSense, which offers advanced capabilities."
"It's open source."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"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."
"I think that the infrastructure for the VPN could be improved. The way that it is bundled also made it difficult to use and sell as it is too expensive."
"Backup can be improved."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"With FortiGate, the main complaint that I have heard is about the technical support."
"The captive portal could be improved."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"More detail needed for configuration of the VPN."
"Pricing is an area where the solution lacks since it is an expensive tool."
"We feel that Cisco provides smaller features, with fewer possibilities versus other solutions out there."
"We can’t access GUI management and CLI opening features when the Internet is unavailable."
"FortiGate is cheaper than Meraki. Even the license renewal is less than Meraki."
"Meraki MX can come across as an expensive solution."
"The product is quite complex to set up."
"Management can be improved in Meraki MX."
"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."
"OPNsense showed me some problems when using it in different environments. The problem is integration with a virtual server."
"The only thing that I would like to see improved is the Insight or the NetFlow analysis part. It would be good to have the possibility to dig down on the Insight platform. Right now, we can easily do only a few analyses. If this page becomes more powerful, it surely will be a well-adopted platform."
"There are a few weaknesses. For example, there is a lack of some features that I have in certain commercial products."
"In terms of improvement, the performance could be enhanced."
"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."
"The interface of the solution is an area with shortcomings."
"The interface needs to be simplified. It is not user-friendly."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 58 reviews while OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while OPNsense is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". 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". Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Azure Firewall, whereas OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and IPFire. See our Meraki MX vs. OPNsense report.
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