We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Smoothwall Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."The GUI is good."
"The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH."
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches."
"The solution is scalable."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"It is a safe product."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"The documentation is very good."
"The plugins or add-ons are most valuable. Sometimes, they are free of charge, and sometimes, you have to pay for them, but you can purchase or download very valuable plugins or add-ons to perform internal testing of your network and simulate a denial-of-service attack or whichever attack you want to simulate. You can also remote and monitor your network and see where the gap is. Did you forget a printer port? Most attacks at the moment are happening through printers, and they can tell you immediately that you forgot to close the port of the printer. There are more than one million printers that are in danger, and everybody knows that hackers are using them to enter the network. So, you can download plugins to protect your network."
"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."
"For everyday tasks, we just get alerts. It's anything that's suspicious, including from our Netgate. So, it's part of how we maintain cybersecurity in our school. This is working alongside our endpoint security solution."
"A very stable product that lasts over time, easy to understand, and administer."
"The features I have found best are ease of use, GUI, and performance."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"The scalability is very good, where you can do an HA configuration and then bring in another box, if necessary."
"It was easy to initially deploy it."
"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 would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"Scalability for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be improved. SD-WAN security for this solution also needs some improvement."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"It should integrate with LDAP, Active Directory, etc, to improve the way in which the traces and connections of each IP, or user connected through the firewall, are shown."
"Ease of use is a problem for a user who is unfamiliar with this product because, in the interface, everything has to be set manually."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"A malware blocker should be included. I do not know if it is included yet. However, until now, we have not experienced a large malware invasion."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"The solution could use better reporting. They need to offer more of it in general. Right now, the graphics aren't the best. If you need to provide a report to a manager, for example, it doesn't look great. They need to make it easier to understand and give users the ability to customize them."
"The router monitoring needs improvement when compared with Sonicwall."
"The solution could improve by having centralized management and API support online."
"There is room for improvement in the UI. They can improve it by making it so that everything is in one place, so we don't have to jump around to different pages."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Smoothwall Firewall is ranked 34th in Firewalls with 1 review. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Smoothwall Firewall is rated 9.0. 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 Smoothwall Firewall writes "Offers good scalability and monitoring features ". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Smoothwall Firewall is most compared with OPNsense.
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