IPFire vs Netgate pfSense comparison

IPFire Project and Netgate are both solutions in the Firewalls category. IPFire Project is ranked #37 with an average rating of 8.0, while Netgate is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8. IPFire Project holds a 1.3% mindshare in Firewalls, compared to Netgate’s 17.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IPFire Project users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Netgate users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IPFire and Netgate pfSense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls.

To learn more, read our detailed Firewalls Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Firewalls

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiGate

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 20.3%, up from 17.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IPFire is 1.3%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netgate pfSense is 17.6%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Firewalls

Featured Reviews

EhabAli

Sr. Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at BMB

Efficient, user-friendly, and affordable

In the past, NSS Labs was utilized to test files and verify the numbers and datasheets. It would be beneficial to have an organization or testing lab that can verify the numbers in our datasheets since changes are frequently made, which can be inconvenient for review. For instance, when comparing different competitors such as Forcepoint, Palo Alto, and Check Point, the throughput or numbers in the datasheet may be lower than the actual numbers. Conversely, Fortinet typically reports very high numbers, but they cannot be replicated in the real world. Therefore, it would be advantageous for them to partner with a neutral testing organization such as NSS Labs to validate these numbers, thus providing more credibility and comfort to everyone regarding the accuracy of the datasheets. For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial. This tool shows a lot of promise and is very good. Making it free would help many companies deliver their products in a more efficient and integrated way. It would also be more valuable to include the tool with the firewall package or license instead of having to pay extra for it. Paying extra puts more pressure on small companies to deliver the firewall and complete the configuration, especially if they have hundreds or thousands of policies. It's very painful to move through these policies line by line. The stability has room for improvement. When it comes to Secure SD-WAN, everything is fine. They are going the right way. SD-WAN is very promising. They can provide the SD-WAN solution separately, but they will not take this approach because even the smallest firewall can support the features, so there is no need to have a separate service or appliance. They are following the right steps, and there is nothing to be improved. Feature-wise, I'm really satisfied with the new release, and the features they have added. For now, it's fine.

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Amr Fouad

Vice President of Technology Development at SCADA Innovations

Prevented any kind of hacking and enables us to comply with customer requirements

We use the solution for firewall, intrusion prevention and detection. We installed it in order to comply with customers requirements IPFire has prevented any kind of hacking and enables us to comply with customer requirements. Accessing the internet was a bit complicated. We opted for this…

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Vincent Hamm

CIO and President at Aim High! Inc.

I appreciate the depth of what the solution can do and the simplicity of the initial setup

We do a lot of managed services and are currently trying to get people off of L2TP VPN. Apparently, we can download a mobile config file from a configured NetGate device, and we're primarily Apple. We've experimented with it on a device that's not a production device, and we can't seem to get the phase one IPSec set correctly so that the Apple config will accept it. We've tried looking at the documentation but haven't found anything. While it's not the highest priority, it is rather frustrating. We'd like to do this, and the feature is right there, but we can't get it configured. We certainly don't want to try it on a production machine because it will break the current VPN. I would like to download the Apple mobile config so that I can tell it to configure my VPN connection to do that. We have some cross-platform things. So there's also a Windows VPN. You can download a script or a PowerShell, put it on a Windows machine, and it can connect to the VPN. It would be nice if I could say I want Mac only, Windows only, or both. I wish it could configure the IPSec phase one and phase two, or at least give me solid instructions on how to configure that. It doesn't supply out-of-the-box visibility to drive decisions. You get 75 log lines, so if you're trying to troubleshoot something, you have to look at one log and then another. It integrates with SysLog systems, but our customers are not at the level where they want to pay for some third-party SysLog system. Usually, we can get things taken care of fairly quickly. I would like to have the ability to control all my devices from one place. With Ubiquiti, you can get a controller that allows you to control all of your Wi-Fi devices, switches, and routers. From one area, you can switch to that customer and see what's happening in their environment. That's not part of pfSense. I understand why it's not because pfSense is open source and community supported. That's something that someone in the community needs to pick up and run with. It's not something the pfSense can easily implement. If they could, that'd be great.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Good anti-malware and web filtering features."

"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."

"It performs very well."

"The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH."

"Fortinet FortiGate has many valuable features, such as IDS, and intrusion detection. It has security features that are in part with the technologies that are available in the market."

"We can use our devices to check all of the perimeters. It secures email websites."

"The features that prevent internet connections, the filtering are the most valuable because we did not have any internet protection before."

"The solution is stable."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

"IPFire has prevented any kind of hacking and enables us to comply with customer requirements."

"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."

"Netgate pfSense has a lot of different applications you can use for VPN and multi-way traffic."

"It's a good solution for end-users. It's pretty easy to work with."

"PfSense is fairly simple to configure and has a good administration interface."

"The most valuable feature is the routing capability. We're primarily using the appliance as a router to provide DNS and multi-WAN routing."

"It is a resilient product with a very easy-to-use interface."

"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."

"Support is excellent."

More Netgate pfSense pros

Cons

"The UI could be improved."

"They should improve high CPU and memory usage that occurs."

"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."

"I would like Fortinet to add more automation to FortiGate."

"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."

"There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have."

"It could use more templates for third-party site-to-site VPN setups other than FortiGate and Cisco."

"It would be nice if FortiGate incorporated some built-in endpoint protection features. I would also like a built-in SOC dashboard for managing multiple Fortinet firewalls."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"Accessing the internet was a bit complicated."

"The technical support needs to be improved."

"I don't think pfSense's web filtering solution is the best, so I don't use it for that purpose. They could add a little better web filtering solution to pfSense. They have solutions in place, like SquidGuard, but they aren't very good."

"I would like to see pfSense integrate WireGuard. Currently, pfSense uses OpenVPN, and there's nothing wrong with it, but WireGuard is a lot leaner and meaner."

"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."

"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."

"I'm trying to set up a gaming server for multiplayer games like 7 Days to Die. I spent three or four days trying to publish a private IP address through pfSense to the outside world. Some commercial and consumer-grade routers can do this, specifically gaming routers, but pfSense is not intended for this usage."

"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."

"It would be nice if the solution had a wizard for some of the complex functions."

More Netgate pfSense cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of Fortinet FortiGate is competitive and not expensive compared to other enterprise- grade solutions. On average, the license cost per year is around seventy percent of the firewall's purchase price."

"If you purchase a one-year subscription with the hardware and then you want to renew for the second year, it is very costly."

"Its price is affordable and lesser than Cisco. Cisco is expensive. In terms of licensing, there is only one issue. If a customer's license has expired a month ago and they do the renewal after one month, Fortinet renews the license from the start of the previous month. The activation of the product is done from the previous month, not from the date of renewal. The customers usually shout and complain that because they are paying today, the renewal should start from today. The support contract renewals or licensing should be renewed from the date of renewal, but Fortinet starts from the day it had expired. It is a loss for customers. They might have had some problems because of which they did not take the license one month before. Fortinet should work on this. Cisco doesn't do this. Cisco always starts from the day they apply for the license."

"The price of Fortinet FortiGate is affordable. Most of our customers are on a three-year license to use the solution. All the features and support are included in the price."

"The cost is too high... They have to focus on more features with less cost for the customer. If you see the market, where it's going, there are a lot of players offering more features for less cost."

"As far as I'm aware, in our case, it's just a yearly pricing arrangement with no additional licensing costs."

"The pricing of the solution is very competitive."

"It is cost-effective, and provides a good value for your money. The pricing, and license renewal, is very reasonable for us."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"There is no license. You don't have to pay anything. It's completely free."

"From Sonic Wall, their price is much higher, because for every feature that you want to add, you have to pay. I can do the same things with pfSense, but everything is included in one price."

"This solution was about $150,000 cheaper than the closest competitor over a three year period."

"This solution provides enterprise-level features at a fraction of the cost of an enterprise firewall."

"Netgate pfSense has a great pricing model."

"PfSense's pricing is reasonable. However, support is relatively expensive for smaller customers, and you need to pay per device to get it. So if Customer A is having an issue, I have to get support, and then I have to get support for Customer B, and so on. It would be nice as a managed services provider to get support for my company rather than individual devices."

"It is open source."

"pfSense pricing is reasonable."

More Netgate pfSense pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

22%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

24%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Government

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?

When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage a...

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What is the biggest difference between Sophos XG and FortiGate?

From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know...

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What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?

As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite ...

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What needs improvement with IPFire?

Accessing the internet was a bit complicated.

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What is your primary use case for IPFire?

We use the solution for firewall, intrusion prevention and detection. We installed it in order to comply with custome...

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What advice do you have for others considering IPFire?

I recommend the solution. Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.

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Help me find the best open source router

You don't really specify what type of router you are looking for but if you are talking about a gateway router I reco...

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How do I choose between Fortinet FortiGate and pfSense?

Fortinet’s Fortigate is a firewall solution we use and are very much satisfied with its performance. We find Fortigat...

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What is the difference between PfSense and OPNsense?

Two of the most common and well recognized firewalls, PfSense and OPNsense both support site-to-site IPsec VPN and cl...

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Comparisons

Sophos XG vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 23% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 11% of the time

WatchGuard Firebox vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 5% of the time

Meraki MX vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 5% of the time

SonicWall TZ vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 5% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate Competitors

OPNsense vs IPFire

Compared 73% of the time

Untangle NG Firewall vs IPFire

Compared 4% of the time

Sophos XGS vs IPFire

Compared 1% of the time

FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) vs IPFire

Compared 1% of the time

More IPFire Competitors

OPNsense vs Netgate pfSense

Compared 44% of the time

Sophos XG vs Netgate pfSense

Compared 8% of the time

KerioControl vs Netgate pfSense

Compared 4% of the time

Sophos UTM vs Netgate pfSense

Compared 2% of the time

Stormshield Network Security vs Netgate pfSense

Compared 1% of the time

More Netgate pfSense Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

January 2025

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

Firewalls

January 2025

Download IPFire product report

Buyer's Guide

Netgate pfSense

December 2024

Download Netgate pfSense product report

Also Known As

FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate, Fortinet Firewall

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Fortinet

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IPFire Project

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Netgate

Overview

Fortinet FortiGate offers comprehensive network security and firewall protection across multiple locations. It effectively manages data traffic and secures environments with features like VPN, intrusion prevention, and UTM controls.

Organizations rely on Fortinet FortiGate for its robust integration with advanced security policies, ensuring significant protection for enterprises, cloud environments, and educational sectors. It facilitates network segmentation, application-level security, and authentication management, securing communication within and between locations such as branches and data centers. Its efficient SD-WAN and UTM features enable streamlined data management and enhanced threat protection capabilities. Users appreciate its centralized management, facilitating seamless operations across diverse environments.

What are the key features of Fortinet FortiGate?

VPN Capabilities: Ensure secure remote access for users and seamless site-to-site connections.
Intrusion Prevention System (IPS): Detect and prevent security threats and vulnerabilities.
Advanced Firewall: Offers robust firewalling with application control and web filtering.
SD-WAN: Optimizes application performance and enhances bandwidth management.
SSL VPN: Provides reliable and secure access for remote workers.

What benefits should users expect from Fortinet FortiGate?

High-performance Security: Delivers effective threat mitigation with high availability.
Centralized Management: Simplifies network operations with cloud-based management tools.
Detailed Analytics: Provides comprehensive insights into network activity and security threats.
Load Balancing: Ensures optimal resource distribution and traffic management.

Fortinet FortiGate is crucial in sectors like education, offering robust networks for secure data flow between campuses and facilitating remote learning. In enterprise environments, it allows efficient management of application traffic and security across multiple branches, while in the cloud, it seamlessly integrates with diverse platforms to enhance security infrastructure.

IPFire enhances network security and protects against cyber threats. It provides a secure firewall, secure remote access, and customizable options. Users praise its ease of use, flexibility, and reliability for network monitoring and traffic shaping. Its valuable features include efficient firewall capabilities, a user-friendly interface, and reliable network performance.

Netgate pfSense is widely leveraged by organizations for its comprehensive capabilities in firewalls, VPN servers, and bandwidth management. It suits LAN, WAN, and DMZ networks, offering secure, scalable, and efficient networking solutions.

Netgate pfSense stands out in diverse environments with its enterprise-grade features and cost-effective operations compared to competitors like Cisco. Deployed as an edge device, it optimizes routing, ad-blocking, content filtering, and traffic shaping. Users benefit from its versatile configurations, robust firewall protection, VPN functionality, and ISP load balancing. The open-source nature allows for extensive customization, integrating plugins like Snort and pfBlockerNG, and compatibility with third-party tools enhances its utility. The intuitive GUI combined with detailed logging and centralized management fortifies network security.

What features define Netgate pfSense?

Firewall: Provides robust network security through advanced filtering and stateful packet inspections.
VPN: Ensures secure remote access with high-performing VPN capabilities.
Load Balancing: Efficiently distributes traffic across multiple ISPs, ensuring uptime and performance.
Customization: Supports various plugins for enhanced functionality, tailor-made to specific needs.
Scalability: Adapts easily to varying network demands, providing high availability and flexibility.

What benefits should be considered for ROI?

Cost-Effectiveness: Delivers premium features at a fraction of the cost of traditional network appliances.
Flexibility: Offers a customizable solution that integrates well with existing infrastructure.
Community Support: Backed by a strong user community offering insights and troubleshooting resources.
Security: Supports VLAN segmentation, enhancing protection and management of network traffic.

Organizations in industries such as finance, healthcare, and education find Netgate pfSense integral due to its advanced security features and cost benefits. Its scalable architecture and strong VPN support are crucial for industries requiring stringent data protection and reliable remote access. The adaptability of pfSense makes it suitable for dynamic environments seeking comprehensive, secure networking solutions.

Sample Customers

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, HP, Oracle, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone, Orange, BT Group, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, NTT Communications, Tata Communications, SoftBank, China Mobile, Singtel, Telus, Rogers Communications, Bell Canada, Telkom Indonesia, Telkom South Africa, Telmex, Telia Company, Telkom Kenya

1. Siemens 2. IBM 3. Cisco 4. Dell 5. HP 6. Intel 7. Oracle 8. Google 9. Microsoft 10. Amazon 11. Apple 12. Facebook 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Adobe 16. SAP 17. VMware 18. Juniper Networks 19. Ericsson 20. Nokia 21. AT&T 22. Verizon 23. T-Mobile 24. Vodafone 25. Orange 26. Deutsche Telekom 27. British Telecom 28. Comcast 29. Time Warner 30. Sony 31. Samsung 32. LG

Nerds On Site Inc., RKC Development Inc., Expertech, Fisher's Technology, Ncisive, Consulting, CPURX, Vaughn's Computer House Calls, Imeretech LLC, Digital Crisis, Carolina Digital Phone, Technigogo Technology Services, The Simple Solution, SwiftecITInc, Rocky Mountain Tech Team, Free Range Geeks, Alaska Computer Geeks, Lark Information Technology, Renaissance Systems Inc., Cutting Edge Computers, Caretech LLC, GoVanguard, Network Touch Ltd, P.C. Solutions.Net, Vision Voice and Data Systems LLC, Montgomery Technologies, Techforce, Concero Networks, ASONInc, CPS Electronics and Consulting, Darkwire.net LLC, IT Specialists, MBS-Net Inc., VOICE1 LLC, Advantage Networking Inc., Powerhouse Systems, Doxa Multimedia Inc., Pro Computer Service, Virtual IT Services, A&J Computers Inc., Envision IT LLC, CommunicaONE Inc., Bone Computer Inc., Amax Engineering Corporation, QPG Ltd. Co., IT 101 Inc., Perfect Cloud Solutions, Applied Technology Group Inc., The Digital Sun Group LLC, Firespring

Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls. Updated: January 2025.

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