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Netgate pfSense vs Untangle NG Firewall comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.3
Fortinet FortiGate offers cost-effective and efficient security with quick ROI, reducing expenses in data communication and management.
Sentiment score
6.6
Netgate pfSense users enjoy high ROI through cost-effective hardware flexibility, reduced expenses, and efficient network management with reliability.
Sentiment score
8.4
Untangle NG Firewall offers cost-effective, efficient deployment and management with detailed reporting and effective threat protection, enhancing ROI.
Clients are now comfortable and not wasting productive hours on IT support.
We have experienced a positive return on investment by utilizing Fortinet's products.
There's definitely an ROI. Having a centralized way of managing and applying policies across the entire organization always helps.
If they can save their data from attackers then it would save them at least two days of not working plus the cost of recovery, which would be much more than the cost of the system and maintenance.
Since the memory leak fixes, it's been incredibly stable and requires minimal maintenance.
In four years of using it, that payment of 189 dollars per year has already paid off.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Fortinet FortiGate's customer service is praised for problem-solving but criticized for inconsistent response times and language barriers.
Sentiment score
8.3
Netgate pfSense users often rely on community resources over customer service, though paid support is highly rated but sometimes slow.
Sentiment score
4.9
Customer service for Untangle NG Firewall is mixed, with both praise for US-based engineers and complaints about limited support resources.
He explained that it required a command line configuration, as it couldn't be done through the graphical user interface.
I would rate their support for FortiGate a nine out of ten.
They offer very accurate solutions.
When I provide detailed information about the problem, they've been able to reply quickly with a solution or go research the problem and get back to us quickly with a fix.
They are highly responsive.
I couldn't imagine having better support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Fortinet FortiGate is scalable, flexible, and adaptable, though some face hardware upgrades and licensing challenges during deployment sizes.
Sentiment score
7.1
Netgate pfSense is scalable from small to large enterprises, with performance influenced by hardware, offering flexibility and manageability.
Sentiment score
6.6
Untangle NG Firewall scales flexibly from small to large deployments, typically supporting 100-150 users without hardware changes.
They scale up really well from smaller models like the FortiGate 40 and 50 to bigger sites with the FortiGate 100 for more throughput - up to enterprise datacenters.
The processor, the microprocessor and the security processors are very intelligent so they can scale significantly and manage that well.
There are many options available, and we can choose the size of the box based on our requirements.
If I put things into a certain context and say that we have a network that has around 100 people, then you don't put up a device that can manage 100 people. Instead, you need to get a device that can manage 150 to 200 people, and then you can create room for growth.
I don't think Netgate pfSense can offer much scalability for big enterprises.
Even with a jump from a 50 megabit to a 500 megabit internet connection and approximately 65 active VPN clients, our firewall operates smoothly without any strain.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Fortinet FortiGate is praised for its stability and reliability, with occasional issues improved by updates and configurations.
Sentiment score
7.3
Netgate pfSense is highly stable and reliable, with rare issues usually tied to hardware or power-related glitches.
Sentiment score
8.2
Untangle NG Firewall is praised for its stability and reliability, with minimal issues and consistent performance rated highly by users.
There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze.
Improper handling of these can lead to a memory surge, a well-known bug that can cause the entire system to freeze.
It is less stable than Palo Alto Networks and Check Point firewalls because there are lots of bugs in the latest firmware.
I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.
I've noticed a substantial improvement in stability and ease of use for upgrades and patching over the past year or two.
When I replace consumer routers with pfSense for small businesses with two or three employees, they are often amazed to discover the router can run for a year without a reboot.
 

Room For Improvement

Fortinet FortiGate needs improvements in stability, usability, integration, cost-effectiveness, and documentation for enhanced user satisfaction and performance.
Netgate pfSense needs interface improvements, better integration, VPN support, and enhanced reporting due to user concerns and limitations.
Untangle NG Firewall needs better filtering, SSL decryption, real-time protection, enhanced hardware, reporting, connectivity, and improved support.
If I have put 10 GBPS of throughput on a firewall and I enable all of these features available, such as IPS or UTM functionalities, the throughput comes down to 1 GBPS.
By providing an integrated solution, users would have access to all features and functionalities within a single window, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple windows.
Investing in a solution that can accommodate such growth would be more cost-effective than repeatedly purchasing new hardware.
There is some trade-off between having a certain level of security and maintaining acceptable performance.
If I need to go between different VLANs, I have VLAN 19.1 and VLAN 19.2, and I strictly use Netgate pfSense, but it doesn't route very efficiently and works quite slowly.
They should support the idea of configuration management as code from source code and provide a more robust API for managing the pfSense configuration.
 

Setup Cost

Fortinet FortiGate offers competitive pricing with varied costs; affordable long-term licenses, though renewal complexity can accumulate costs.
Netgate pfSense offers affordable, flexible firewall solutions with free and paid versions, minimizing costs with optional support.
Secure SD-WAN is free of charge.
The most expensive part is the renewal of the license subscription.
FortiGate is priced lower than Palo Alto.
The price of setup is approximately €500 to €800, which also includes the initial monitoring.
You can acquire a decent embedded PC for around a hundred dollars and install pfSense on it, effectively creating a robust firewall solution.
The product is free of cost.
 

Valuable Features

Fortinet FortiGate offers advanced security features, user-friendly configuration, and comprehensive management tools, valued for robust protection and flexibility.
Netgate pfSense offers cost-effective, flexible, open-source network solutions with customizable features and robust community support for security and monitoring.
Untangle NG Firewall offers flexibility, ease of use, strong VPN, reliable performance, premium features, and is ideal for small businesses.
Fortigate blocks unusual traffic and therefore secures our network.
It's easy to monitor the end-to-end network through the firewall.
The firewall, IPS, and VPN functions are the most valuable features.
The software competes effectively with far more expensive commercial alternatives and is used by hundreds of thousands of businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies all over the world.
With pfSense, network configurations adhere to standard practices, facilitating troubleshooting without the need for complex overlays or policies.
The price point is the most valuable aspect of the solution.
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiGate
Sponsored
Ranking in Firewalls
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
317
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st)
Netgate pfSense
Ranking in Firewalls
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
206
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Untangle NG Firewall
Ranking in Firewalls
25th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Unified Threat Management (UTM) (8th)
 

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 Netgate pfSense is 17.6%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Untangle NG Firewall is 1.3%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewalls
 

Featured Reviews

DineshKumar28 - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective threat prevention with responsive customer support
We are using Fortinet FortiGate as a firewall Fortinet FortiGate has been invaluable. It has helped save costs due to its various features, reliable performance, very good UI, low latency, and stability. The Threat Intel engine in Fortinet FortiGate is highly rated for its effectiveness in…
Vincent Hamm - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Josh Evans - PeerSpot reviewer
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
I've heard other people saying that other firewalls have better detection rates, so better security. If they can improve the security of the device, I'm always for that, but at the moment, we've been happy with the service that we're getting out of them. 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. It could use some improvement for Azure Active Directory Connections. It does exist, and it is available, but it needs work to be able to fully authenticate. I know there are some advanced features that other firewalls have that aren't present in Untangle, but we've never noticed any feature that we need but isn't there. I also know a lot of people have complained about the cost per device because they license by device counts. So, once you get over a certain number of devices, it is not really a cost-effective solution.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
22%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Untangle NG Firewall?
The product helps small and medium enterprises secure their networks from intrusions. It also has features like DNS b...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Untangle NG Firewall?
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.
What needs improvement with Untangle NG Firewall?
I would recommend getting 2FA with an SSL VPN type of setup without having to go through a lot of hoops. The solution...
 

Also Known As

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

 

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
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
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,
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate pfSense vs. Untangle NG Firewall and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
825,399 professionals have used our research since 2012.