IPFire vs Untangle NG Firewall comparison

IPFire Project and Arista are both solutions in the Firewalls category. IPFire Project is ranked #35 with an average rating of 8.0, while Arista is ranked #32 with an average rating of 8.0. IPFire Project holds a 1.1% mindshare in Firewalls, compared to Arista’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IPFire Project users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Arista users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IPFire and Untangle NG Firewall 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.

To learn more, read our detailed IPFire vs. Untangle NG Firewall Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

IPFire vs. Untangle NG Firewall

April 2026

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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 June 2026, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 15.1%, down from 21.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IPFire is 1.1%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Untangle NG Firewall is 1.0%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiGate	15.1%
Untangle NG Firewall	1.0%
IPFire	1.1%
Other	82.8%

Firewalls

Featured Reviews

Abhinandan Yadav

Network Security Engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Unified security and sd-wan have improved uptime and cut wan costs for multi-site branches

Users report stability issues in certain versions, which requires regular updates. Real-world attacks have also highlighted the need for urgent patching of vulnerabilities.Fortinet FortiGate, while a powerful and feature-rich web firewall, could improve in areas like firmware stability, documentation, and ease of use. The learning curve can be steep for some users. For beginners, support quality can vary, and frequent updates with occasional vulnerabilities call for careful patch management. However, once Fortinet FortiGate is configured, it remains highly reliable and efficient. Customer support needs improvement, as I find it very slow, with reports from other users reflecting that customer support is inadequate.

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DanielS

Head Competence Team IT at Duktig Brand

Blocking access from specific countries and ensuring robust security have been effortlessly achieved

I use IPFire to protect my home The best feature of IPFire is the location block functionality. It allows me to block certain countries from accessing my site. Additionally, it is a solution that is available for free, which is perfect. The graphical interface could be much better. I have…

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Gary-Downey

Director of Information Technology at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Has provided built-in VPN tools and reporting features that streamline remote access and monitoring tasks

We do an outside-sourced threat prevention regarding the Threat Prevention features. I haven't run into areas that could be improved or cons versus pros for Untangle NG Firewall. I haven't done anything too advanced when it comes to the filtering, so I'm not sure what can be improved or added. I haven't dug into the advanced features, but I think some of the advanced capabilities are probably where it lacks a little bit, with the filtering and firewall rules. These areas could be improved to make it a nine out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 for overall rating.

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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

"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate IPS is its efficiency."

"Its stability is the most valuable."

"There are multiple features I have found to be valuable, such as encryption and integrated security features."

"The pricing on offer is excellent."

"For the performance they provide, the price is acceptable."

"Overall, we're very happy with their firewalls, but when we have issues or bugs, there are some difficulties in finding the resolution."

"The firewalls are valuable for threat prevention."

"The impact of SD-WAN on my network performance is clear, and if we speak about Fortinet Unified SASE, it is effective for me."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

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

"I would rate the stability as ten out of ten for IPFire."

"From a small business perspective, it's a very good product because you don't really have to be that technical in order to use it."

"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."

"Web filtering is very reliable."

"We have had incredibly good results with all of its features."

"The most valuable features are IPS, MAPI, NAT, and VPN."

"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."

"The product helps small and medium enterprises secure their networks from intrusions. It also has features like DNS blocking."

"The web blocking for my clients and the application control are valuable."

More Untangle NG Firewall pros

Cons

"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 performance can be better. We have had performance issues in the past, but we sometimes tend to find that it is more related to what we do in our network than anything else. It is quite a good product, and there isn't much to improve."

"There should be some open-source training or free training for decision makers, or some webinars should be available. These would help understand the new product line and the existing product line features."

"It's one of the more expensive brands."

"FortiLink is the interface on the firewall that allows you to extend switch management across all of your switches in the network. The problem with it is that you can't use multiple interfaces unless you set them up in a lag. Only then you can run them. So, it forces you to use a core type of switch to propagate that management out to the rest of the switches, and then it is running the case at 200. It leaves you with 18 ports on the firewall because it is also a layer-three router that could also be used as a switch, but as soon as you do that, you can't really use them. They could do a little bit more clean up in the way the stacking interface works. Some use cases and the documentation on the FortiLink checking interface are a little outdated. I can find stuff on version 5 or more, but it is hard to find information on some of the newer firmware. The biggest thing I would like to see is some improvement in the switch management feature. I would like to be able to relegate some of the ports, which are on the firewall itself, to act as a switch to take advantage of those ports. Some of these firewalls have clarity ports on them. If I can use those, it would mean that I need to buy two less switches, which saves time. I get why they don't, but I would still like to see it because it would save a little bit of space in the server rack."

"The support package being an additional extra, even with an enterprise package purchase, is pathetic. Though I haven't had direct experience with support, the fact that it doesn't come by default, which is very misleading compared to other brands, warrants a rating of two out of ten."

"The monitoring and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak. I would for them to develop better visibility, monitoring, and reporting."

"The solution isn't exactly scalable, especially when it comes to the public cloud environment."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"The graphical interface could be much better."

"Accessing the internet was a bit complicated."

"Whenever there are a large number of endpoint VPN clients, connectivity becomes slow."

"The product must improve its reporting features."

"The common center facility that Untangle provides should be available on-premises."

"At this stage, I think the SSL decryption option can be streamlined."

"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 hardware can be improved."

"The user interface, training, and general product innovation need improvement."

"It would be much easier if there was a mobile app."

More Untangle NG Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the price of Fortinet FortiGate SWG a seven and a half out of ten since it is not a cheap solution, though I feel it is a good product for the money one pays."

"The pricing is better compared to other solutions like Check Point, Arista, or Cisco."

"The price is fair compared to the other competitors."

"The initial setup is super straight forward and as far as the licensing goes for the small product that we have, the pricing was pretty competitive. It wasn't as simple and as cheap as a SonicWall but for the service we would get it was a good price."

"The tool's pricing is neither cheap nor expensive. Overall, I find it to be competitive in the market."

"It was pretty affordable. We did go a little bit above MSRP, but the service pack that was included was quite worth the additional costs. It is competitively priced compared to other major players in the market. It is significantly cheaper than Check Point, which is a primary competitor. Additionally, its pricing is comparable to that of Cisco's ASA and a few other vendors."

"It has been two years. I don't remember the actual price, but it was affordable. We buy the boxes and then use the license for three years."

"Their licensing costs are annual. The UTM feature license along with their support is called FortiCare. We include that as a part of the annual maintenance cost. Palo Alto or Juniper also have an annual subscription charge for UTM. Price, of course, can always be more competitive, but it is not the most expensive product. The price-performance ratio is quite high for FortiGate."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"Usually, it's about $350 a year for 12 users, and it's about $600 for 50 users. It's very reasonable as compared to the others. One of the reasons is that they're all open-source. You just buy their appliance and put it in until it dies. Because it's run under open platforms, mine seems to always work on older equipment. I've taken old equipment and put a new hard disk in it. I have taken about nine-year-old computers and put their operating system on them, and ran them like a champ. The only thing that changed was the hard drive because I don't trust a hard drive that's more than three to four years old."

"The pricing model is better than with SonicWall."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

"This is not an expensive product. It is affordable and there are different packages available depending on the features that you need, or the sector that you are in."

"The setup cost is about $2000 to $3000 per year."

"Untangle is open-source software. So, you can get it for free. That has been a benefit, especially for the residential users because it is free. The license costs start at $25 a month for some additional features, including higher tiers of security intrusion prevention. The free version comes with intrusion detection, and then the license version has intrusion prevention. It also has some additional things for active directory connectors, etc. It starts at $25 a month to cover 12 devices. Then it goes up from $25 to $50 a month for 12 to 25 devices. That's where it really doesn't scale out per site. If you have a site that has more than 50 devices on it, then Untangle quickly becomes cost prohibitive in comparison to several other competitors."

"The solution is fairly priced."

"The tool's pricing is moderate, and licensing costs are yearly."

More Untangle NG Firewall pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

21%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

University

Comms Service Provider

15%

Manufacturing Company

University

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	368
Midsize Enterprise	135
Large Enterprise	193

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	1

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?

The graphical interface could be much better.

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What is your primary use case for IPFire?

I use IPFire ( /products/ipfire-reviews ) to protect my home.

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What advice do you have for others considering IPFire?

Sometimes configuring IPFire is challenging. Overall, I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Untangle NG Firewall?

It is not very expensive, so it is affordable for my budget.

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What needs improvement with Untangle NG Firewall?

I would appreciate improvements to the ad blocker and SSL Inspector of Untangle NG Firewall.

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What is your primary use case for Untangle NG Firewall?

My usual use cases for Untangle NG Firewall are just like a firewall and router. The main purpose is for firewall fun...

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Comparisons

Sophos Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 17% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 13% of the time

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 5% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 3% of the time

Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 3% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate Competitors

OPNsense vs IPFire

Compared 63% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs IPFire

Compared 7% of the time

Sophos Firewall vs IPFire

Compared 5% of the time

Smoothwall Firewall vs IPFire

Compared 5% of the time

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs IPFire

Compared 3% of the time

More IPFire Competitors

OPNsense vs Untangle NG Firewall

Compared 17% of the time

Sophos UTM vs Untangle NG Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Untangle NG Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Sophos Firewall vs Untangle NG Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

WatchGuard Firebox vs Untangle NG Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Untangle NG Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

May 2026

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

Firewalls

May 2026

Download IPFire product report

Buyer's Guide

Untangle NG Firewall

May 2026

Download Untangle NG Firewall product report

Also Known As

Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall

No data available

Overview

Fortinet FortiGate is a versatile network security tool offering features like VPN, firewall, web filtering, intrusion prevention, and scalability. It is known for its performance and integration with other Fortinet products, making it a preferred choice for robust cybersecurity.

Fortinet FortiGate stands out as a comprehensive cybersecurity solution with strong performance and ease of configuration. It delivers unified threat management, integrating features such as dynamic routing, SD-WAN support, and centralized management. Despite its strengths, improvements in the web interface's stability, pricing structures, and reporting capabilities are needed. Users seek better integration with third-party tools and automation advancements to enhance the experience further. These enhancements, alongside improvements in bandwidth management and the reduction of licensing costs, are points of interest for users looking to capitalize on FortiGate's extensive capabilities.

What are Fortinet FortiGate's key features?

VPN: Ensures secure remote connections.
Firewall: Protects against unauthorized access.
Web Filtering: Blocks malicious sites and content.
Application Control: Manages and controls applications.
Intrusion Prevention: Detects and prevents vulnerabilities.
SSL Inspection: Enhances security by inspecting encrypted traffic.

What benefits should be considered when evaluating Fortinet FortiGate?

Affordability: Offers cost-effective security solutions.
Reliability: Known for consistent and stable performance.
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other Fortinet products.
Comprehensive Protection: Provides broad threat protection capabilities.

Fortinet FortiGate is widely implemented across industries as a primary firewall system for securing internet gateways and safeguarding data centers. It supports businesses in achieving SD-WAN integration and enhances cybersecurity by providing essential features like antivirus, web filtering, and application control. Enterprises utilize FortiGate for securing remote connections and ensuring compliance with security standards, making it adaptable for different network sizes and industries.

Fortinet

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.

IPFire Project

Untangle NG Firewall provides a user-centric security firewall solution. It combines ease of integration with features such as comprehensive web filtering, VPN capabilities, and content control, tailored for small businesses and scalable for enterprise deployments.

Untangle NG Firewall is designed to enhance network security for small businesses, law offices, and unions. It offers centralized management and strong performance with features like SSL inspection, application control, and threat detection. Users appreciate customization options, bandwidth management, and tools like OpenVPN. However, there is room for improvement in reporting, hardware specs, and configuration options to match evolving security requirements. The call for a mobile app, better content filtering, and robust VPN capabilities is growing alongside a desire for improved licensing and support structures.

What are the important features?

Web Filtering: Provides comprehensive controls for managing internet access.
VPN Capabilities: Ensures secure remote access via stable VPN connections.
SSL Inspection: Inspects encrypted traffic for threats.
Application Control: Allows management of applications in the network.
Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates potential security risks.

What benefits and ROI can be found in reviews?

User-Friendliness: Simplifies network management with easy setup and integration.
Cost-Effectiveness: Affordable pricing with potential savings through hardware-as-a-service model.
Security: Offers robust security features and tools to ensure network safety.
Scalability: Accommodates growth from small to enterprise-level networks.

In industries like law offices and unions, Untangle NG Firewall is implemented primarily on-premises and managed via the cloud. Its integration with existing hardware allows for seamless deployment, delivering features such as web filtering, intrusion prevention, and virus blocking. The easy setup and diverse capabilities make it a suitable option for enhancing security in various professional environments.

Arista

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

North American Stamping Group, Cerebral Palsy of North Jersey (CPNJ), Brown County Schools, IN, City of Bridgeton, MO, Lancaster County, SC, Vision Charter School, Clay County Sheriff’s Department, NC, Breakwater School, Boys & Girls Club of Manchester, NH, Admiral Farragut Academy, Flow Companies, No Ordinary Hotel, KECdesign,

Buyer's Guide

IPFire vs. Untangle NG Firewall

April 2026

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