We performed a comparison between pfSense and Untangle NG Firewall based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products received high marks from reviewers, but Untangle NG Firewall ultimately won out in this comparison. It is easy to set up, user-friendly and secure. In addition it has excellent customer support and is fairly priced.
"It is simple to manage, and there are a lot of functionalities in the same box."
"Centralized monitoring, policy management, and virtualized appliances allow us to take control over our public and private infrastructure."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"The features that we have found most valuable are the SSL VPN and the User Portal."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"The performance is good."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution."
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"It is effective. We have not had any problems."
"It is a very good solution for enterprises that need a VPN for their employees. It is the best way to provide a remote work facility to employees at a very low cost. Other solutions that I have had in the past were very expensive. Enterprises don't always have that kind of money to invest."
"This solution has increased the level of security, given us more control, provided a deep insight into network traffic, and is a great VPN solution."
"The features I have found best are ease of use, GUI, and performance."
"We can run it on any hardware."
"There is good documentation with a fantastic community and enterprise support."
"The solution is very robust."
"The features I have found the most useful are the web filter, the captive portal, the SSL inspector, and the ad-blocker. They're awesome."
"Easy to set up and easy to integrate."
"The product’s most valuable features are endpoint protection management, load balancing, and connectivity with Active Directory."
"It is not attached to an appliance, meaning if you get a good PC/server, then you can already run a firewall."
"The web blocking for my clients and the application control are valuable."
"Its detection, antivirus, and filtering features are the most valuable. The facility to connect by using the VPN connection is also a very valuable feature. It is very strong, secure, and reliable. We have implemented the Untangle solution in all hardware. It is also a user-friendly solution. It is easy to learn and easy to configure."
"The product helps small and medium enterprises secure their networks from intrusions. It also has features like DNS blocking."
"The majority of our clients are very small businesses, and Untangle devices have been fantastic for these small clients. We've basically standardized our stack to just simply use Untangle. We include the hardware and the service option, which makes it very easy and affordable for us to just simply push that into the monthly per-user costing that we provide as a managed services provider. It's really a no-brainer. They're easy to use, and they're easy to set up and configure. Support is generally good about resolving any issues that we have. We haven't had any real complaints."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"It does not have key authentication for admin access."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"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."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"Could be simplified for new users."
"Improve analysis of logs and dashboards (control panel) with improved alert functionality."
"It is not centrally managed, where you log into the website and can see all your services there. We would like to be able to see is all the configurations from a central interface on all our pfSenses."
"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."
"pfSense has some limitations in detecting site sessions. We want to control internet usage based on sites and their content, and pfSense doesn't perform this function."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
"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 could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"The hardware can be improved."
"The ability to setup a DDNS for each WAN independently would be a very handy feature."
"For the web filter, I think they can do better especially on the free model."
"It does have multi-factor authentication in some areas, but I would love to see a more widely implemented version of that on the devices themselves."
"The pricing is not as good as it was some time ago. They've since skipped offering a lot of individual features."
"They don't have any feature that allows you to drop the session."
"Whenever there are a large number of endpoint VPN clients, connectivity becomes slow."
"The pricing should be reduced because it is expensive."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Untangle NG Firewall is ranked 24th in Firewalls with 22 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Untangle NG Firewall 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 Untangle NG Firewall writes "Its simplicity, variety of features, and low pricing have enabled us to improve the security for our small business clients at a price that they are happy to pay for". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Untangle NG Firewall is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, SonicWall TZ and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Untangle NG Firewall report.
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