We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks and pfSense based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: pfSense has an edge in this comparison as it is a free, open-source solution while Palo Alto Networks is considered expensive by its users.
"User-friendly and affordable security solution that's recommended for SMB customers. This solution has good technical support."
"The wireless control is helpful."
"The simplicity of the product is great. It's very easy to use, which is a compliment we get all the time in terms of feedback."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"Secure, user-friendly, stable, and scalable network security solution. Installation is straightforward."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"The redundancy and scalability ARE very nice."
"It is much simpler than other solutions such as Fortinet."
"The solution has good customization abilities and plenty of features."
"The solution is fairly scalable when it comes to integrating with other applications and data sets."
"The flexibility of adding new kinds of services without spending any money can't be beaten."
"The documentation is very good."
"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."
"I like that it has high security."
"It has a solid network security with some robust tools. We can block unexpected attacks, especially zero-day attacks. Since they use the Pan-OS engine, they can collect attacks from all over the world and analyze them. They can then protect against zero-day attacks and unexpected attacks."
"The most valuable features are application inspection and sandboxing. Application inspection decides where traffic is transmitted. If I have a perimeter report for a particular service, then other services or malicious services cannot use an open port. In this way, application inspection is doing a fantastic job. We also have a very good sandbox with almost no rate limit. It will inspect any file that comes in and goes out in a dedicated patch to identify malware. Therefore, these two things help me to protect our organization from any bad actors."
"I like the remote access and URL filtering features that are available on global products."
"The application IDs, application controls, URL filtering, visibility, monitoring, and reporting are the most valuable features."
"The sandboxing is valuable and they are frequently updating their signature database. We get new updates every five minutes. That makes it easy to detect new and unknown attacks."
"The application control portion of the solution is its most valuable aspect."
"We utilize advanced threat prevention features like web filtering and SSL decryption, which haven't caused any issues."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"It would be a benefit if Fortinet would release a one-stop solution that is better integrated with other products and an automated emergency response system."
"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."
"Fortinet already improved FortiGate, but in the current market, many brands of security devices have improved together. Fortinet still needs to catch up with market standards. Fortinet is lacking in features in comparison to competitors."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"The firmware needs improvement because there are bugs when a new release comes through. Sometimes, the configuration changes, and it's a bit harder to see where the fail is. The first time that you have the firmware, it tends to have some issues, and it's better to wait a bit to update the equipment."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"Application management can be improved."
"As an open-source solution, there are so many loopholes happening within the product. By design, no one is taking ownership of it, and that is worrisome to me."
"When I checked other packages, it seems they use different tools that are installed on the PSS for functionality. They rely on third-party tools, unlike Fortinet, for example, which has its own tools. In comparison, we also use third-party tools on pfSense. For example, we had a situation where we needed a tool to identify authorized users, and when I searched for a solution, I found a third-party tool. However, using such tools may come with additional costs."
"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."
"I would like to see different graphs available in the reporting."
"The integration should be improved."
"Also, simplifying the rules for the GeoIP. Making it simpler to understand would be an improvement."
"Adjustment in the interfaces: I had to adjust those interfaces manually and of course that is a great feature that you can restore it but it is immediately also one point for improvement. If you don't have to adjust, if it's just stamped and it works, that's great."
"We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs."
"I like the reports, but I wish the reporting was a little better. When I set up the automatic reports to come in, they're pretty basic. I would like them to be a little more advanced at the ACC monitoring and things like that. I still enjoy all the daily alerts that I get and all the daily PDFs and reports, but I just feel that it could expand upon the visualization of the reports."
"When you delete and add a new rule, because of the one hundred rule limit, if the new rule has an ID that is greater than one hundred, even though you have fewer than that, it will not work."
"The solution would benefit from having a dashboard."
"We are not happy with Palo Alto at all. It would be better if they provided more support for the firewall. We have a few pending issues with the configuration for each application. We cannot deploy them yet due to some support-related problems in the firewall. We have deployed a few policies for DNS spoofing and DNS attacks, but we could only block a few IP addresses through the policy. That's DNS security, and we have configured a few policies for DNS spoofing and more. URL categorization and URL filtering are not yet adequately maintained. For example, if you created a few rules in the rule-based configuration and made some rules downstairs, you will lose some of them if you give access upstairs. It's not giving us a proper solution for which route it is using. We need to apply the application-based policies and URL filtering-based policies. It creates more issues because we are not getting good support from the team."
"The analysis of the ITS ID by Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls could be improved."
"The biggest thing that needs to be improved with them is their training. I took a training class for the 8.0 build, then I took it again for the 9.0 and 10 builds. They add new features every time that they do a new major release, but the training doesn't keep up. It is the same basic training that probably was with the 3.0 build, and they just change the screenshots. I would love to see them do some more work since they have all these bells and whistles, but we don't know how to use those features on a large scale."
"We use ACC which is a tool for verifying the activity or traffic within your network. Currently, in ACC, the time of the samples that they offer is about five minutes. When you try to go down to a shorter duration, you can't. You only have five minutes. They can provide samples for shorter durations, such as one minute."
"When it comes to their support, we have to select every single component that we want to include in a particular bundle. That is a very tedious process. T"
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Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls 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 NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Check Point NGFW, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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