KerioControl Reviews

We use Kerio Control primarily for site-to-site VPN and client VPNs.

The solution is easy to manage. Kerio Control is unique compared to other firewalls because it has been around since 2000 when we switched and the name it started with was WinRoute, and then later became Kerio Control. It evolved over time and it is more of a proprietary firewall on its own and has been developed through open source.

The Kerio hardware devices look cheap and could be improved. Some of our clients are switching to Sophos because their hardware has a more sleek design.

I have been using Kerio Control for a long time.

Kerio Control stability is extremely stable. On the administration side, you have total control because of MyKerio. Which is a portal that allows you to control all your Kerio Controls and other Kerio solutions. Similar to other firewall vendors nowadays, they have their own portal to centralize the management of your firewalls. 

The solution is scalable. If you are using virtualized machines you can have as much memory and much storage, but you do not need much storage for this solution. It is powerful and fast, although it can slow down the internet because of the filtering. For example, if you have most of your services running, such as antivirus, content filtering, and intrusion prevention. When all of those are all enabled and there is a lot of configuration and it might slow down your internet service to about 70%, instead of a direct simple router.

The technical support is good as a reseller. We have direct connection with the technical support, we can send them an email and they will get back to us. If it requires phone calls, they phone us up or we phone them.

The initial setup is straightforward. You receive a box and then you receive the activation keys. When you receive the activation keys, it will work fine. Without the activation keys, your subscription for firewall, antivirus, and web filter, is not going to work.

If you are doing a fresh installation without the VPN, you have to set up all your routers on each different location to have a site-to-site VPN. However, if you are migrating from a firewall to Kerio Control, you have to migrate the users, DHCPs, and static IPs, that you want to have on the devices to keep you from losing service. For up to a five-site location, it could take approximately one hour for each location to set up the firewalls.

To start out you are going to have to purchase the firewall hardware and the subscription itself which could be approximately $2,000 and for the annual subscription, it will be approximately $400. The subscription entails many aspects, such as you do not lose your antivirus upgrades or your web filtering does not stop.

We are switching from Kerio Control to Sophos because of the sleek design of the devices. If you want a cheaper solution, you can choose Kerio Control, but if you want a much sleeker design, then should consider Sophos.

I rate Kerio Control an eight out of ten.

It is mainly for user control, e.g., who is downloading the most.

We are using the latest version.

It helped a lot with the bandwidth because a lot of our clients complained that the Internet was really slow, then we found it's a Windows update or some guy inside the company using YouTube. With Kerio Control, we found out what was going on, blocked it, or pushed it down.

It helps the IT manager monitor their staff. As for the servers, it gives protection from the outside. Their intrusion protection works extremely well, so you can see if there are issues from outside in the log files. The whole system is just easy to read.

Right before the lockdown, we got requests for home connections like crazy from customers. We put all of them onto Kerio VPN, which is much easier for them. They log onto Kerio VPN and can see their local drives and servers, then they can work.

The VPN is a useful feature.

When you go under status to, "active host", you see what all your users are doing. We found that this is the most useful feature.

The security features are quite easy to use. It gives us everything we need in one product.

The solution’s firewall and intrusion detection features are quite good because you can see exactly who is attacking you and who is getting blocked.

The antivirus is good. Since they changed over to a new provider (GFI), we haven't had issues with it.

A little bit more info when we search on the client under active hosts. We would like to see a column to say what is going on: Is it encrypted? Is it HTTP or HTTPS? Is it connected to a gaming services?

I would like the customer statistics to be more user-friendly. It should explain more what users have been doing throughout the day. Sometimes, it'll just say they downloaded a big file. Meanwhile, they were connected through a VPN.

Since 2006.

The stability is good.

The VPN features are awesome. The only issue that we had is when they changed versions. They removed a security feature and blocked out all the old VPN connections. As a service provider, we had to do an update for a lot of clients' VPNs after their update came out, which created more work for us.

The scalability is awesome.

For our big corporate clients, the solution gets used a lot. We have one client with about 200 users and about 10 to 12 servers.

We have five to six support technicians who work with Kerio Control.

I have never used their technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to install. You just put in a memory stick and boot it up. Or, you just start up the device and follow the on-screen prompts. The deployment takes five minutes.

We do use the online services Kerio provides for our implementation strategy.

Our clients see ROI with Kerio Control, as they are saving bandwidth costs.

Kerio Control has saved time for the members of our team who manage security. It can save us two hours to a day, because if we use Mikrotik or something else, we have to sniff through the logs. With Kerio Control, we just log on and can see immediately what is wrong.

We tried FortiGate and Mikrotik, but they don't do what we want. Licensing is easier with Kerio Control. Also, troubleshooting and implementation on a network is much easier. You don't need to call support all the time. With FortiGate, we realized the licensing is really hectic, because if you skip one year, you have to back pay that year. If you skip two years, you have to back pay two years. With Kerio Control, if a license expires, one year later you can just reactivate and go on.

It tells you what your users are doing or what is happening on your network. It goes into detail and you don't find that on FortiGate.

The way that we sell Kerio is we show our customers what they can do with it. They don't really care much about licensing after they see that you can view each person one by one to see what they're doing. 

I would give the product a 10 out of 10. I have been using this solution for an extremely long time. It is very helpful. With clients that don't have Kerio and have issues with their network, then we'll install a demo version of Kerio, fix the errors and problems, showing them what Kerio does. After, we'll take it out and put them back onto their normal router. It will take about a week or two weeks later, then they will phone us and say, "Please send us a quote for Kerio."

Our primary use case for this solution is a UTM (Unified Threat Management) router.

This solution gives me confidence in the ability to quickly recover from hardware failures.

What I like the most about Kerio is that I can use the software appliance as a solution, so if the hardware fails for any reason then I can quickly replace it with hardware that I have in stock. Typically, I use a Dell OptiPlex i5 desktop or small form factor.

Their support is getting better but still needs improvement. I had been using Kerio products for quite a few years before GFI purchased them.  What liked about the support was that the people you contacted were actually using the product in their homes, they played with the product and broke it and fixed so understood it well. GFI support folks at the first level are script readers and point you to documents you can find on the support website. For me, I have gone down that path already when I opened a ticket. 

I see they have phone support now, but I have not used it.

I cannot think of any features that are needed at this time.

This solution works. The only issues are hardware failures.

With respect to the scalability, I have it running in five-person offices and in fifty-person offices.

The technical support was very good originally but fell short when GFI took over. It is now getting better.

I switched from SonicWall because, at the time, they did not accurately report the throughput of the router when all of the UTM features were enabled. Also, setting up the traffic rules was not as easy as Kerio Control.

The initial setup for this solution is very easy.

The implementation and deployment is something that I do myself.

I do not worry about the ROI. I just need something that works and protects.

My advice is to use your own hardware and do not use theirs.

There were some issues with our main firewall and it went down. In a short time, I deployed KerioControl and save our business.

The most valuable features of KerioControl are ease of configuration, user-friendliness, and comfortable to use. It is an all-in-one solution, it comes with many features, such as a firewall, antivirus software, and network protection.

The GUI should be changed because it remains the same consistency across versions. However, those who have been using KerioControl for a long time may be accustomed to the current interface. Installing a new version in the same location makes it easy to find, but overall, there are no notable changes between versions.

I have been using KerioControl for approximately five years.

KerioControl is stable because it is a Lunux-based system. However, it depends on the cores because they do not change the base core of Linux systems.

The scalability of KerioControl is good and it is easy to do.

I have worked at many companies, and the most users that have been using KerioControl has been 500.

If our company grows and the popularity of KerioControl increases we will increase our usage of the solution.

I have not had the need to use the support from KerioControl because I have found all the answers to my questions online.

I previously used Cisco Firepower and Netgear.

The initial setup of KerioControl is straightforward.

The implementation of the solution was done in-house.

We have received a return on investment.

I compared KerioControl with other companies based on price, functionality, features, and ease of use, ultimately choosing KerioControl as the best option.

The KerioControl is a good solution. It can be deployed on old servers and it works well with no issues.

We mostly use Kerio Control as a virtual firewall solution, and the user accounts let people have access to the internet through the firewall. We also have a few cases where we use the VPN. But it's mostly a firewall solution with multiple VLANs and the network behind it.

It's deployed on-premises, both virtual and hardware solutions. The NG100 is the smallest solution for smaller businesses, but we mostly use the virtual appliance.

Most of our customers are small to medium companies, where there are between five and 40 work spaces. Everyone has a PC and they have a VoIP phone and their own phones, and they have tablets. Most of the time, it's one to four devices per user. The biggest client we have is around 30 users.

It has made it easier for us and our employees to manage and add settings to the firewall, as opposed to another brand where you have to use command-line or really complicated layouts. The ease of use is a big plus.

The solution has also saved us a lot of time in managing security. We have to adjust the content rules and now we have one place where we can enter them. We have a customer with about 20 Kerio Controls and we don't have to set all the rules on each firewall. When we have to add some rules to each of the firewalls, it can be done within one minute. Normally, it would take 20 to 30 minutes, depending on if they're all online — and we would have to check them manually. Now, we just have to enter them and, when they come online, they sync with the global rule sets.

The traffic insight page or the administrative portal is really helpful because you can see all the internet usage down to the point where you can see if it's big files or streams. It gives us a good view of what the internet usage is of users who are coupled to an IP address. That way, if there are problems with, for example, a lot of data usage or problems with the connection, we can narrow it down to a single user or server and address the problem. It's really helpful for diagnostic data.

The content filtering is pretty good for our needs, especially with the global rules you can define. We can define global rules and use them on multiple Kerio Control installations. So we have one place to set all the rules for different customers. That's very good. The rules that it auto-updates and that are automatically available — for example, spam or indecent websites, or whatever else is in the firewall by default — are good.

The VPN works pretty well, especially with the Kerio Control VPN software. Some products don't have their own VPN software and, with Windows, sometimes it's just better to have a piece of software. That's especially true for some of our customers because they only have to open the software and press "Connect." Windows can be a little bit weird when it comes to that, and it breaks connections. You really don't see when Windows loses a connection or if you have to reconnect. The Kerio Control VPN client is pretty good at that.

The antivirus is either on or off, but we can't really see or measure how well it is doing. Sometimes we get the feeling that some files get past it and then they get caught on the antivirus of the client PC. We would like to have more control with the antivirus.

Also, we have multiple employees working on firewalls and if one employee changes a rule and traffic that shouldn't be there suddenly comes through the firewall, it's hard to pinpoint which rule is affecting that traffic because there is some overlap. It's not clear if it's getting past it because it's not decrypted. It needs more logging or more in-depth diagnostics about which traffic is hitting which rule on the firewall. Sometimes we have 20 or 30 rules and it becomes a whole job to figure that out.

When it comes to QOS, the quality of service, you have to set a fixed bandwidth. But sometimes, when we have multiple connections in front of it, it's a fallback line. For example, when we use Kerio aboard a ship, there is the satellite connection but there is also a 3G or 4G connection. We always have to set a fixed limit for the connection. If we set the fixed limit to 4G and it switches to navigation, one user can use up all the bandwidth for the entire ship. It would be better if there were something more dynamic, where it could sense the total and we could use percentages. For example, we could say a user has always 5 percent of the connection. But now we have 5 percent of a fixed connection number. The fixed limit on a line for QOS is a problem because we don't always know which connection is in front of it.

Also, if you have to dive deeper into the firewall or any other features, then you really have to read up a bit about how to set it up properly. Some of my colleagues, in the beginning, jumped in and made a bunch of rules but then it got really messy. If Kerio had a template or guidelines for best practices, at the beginning, that would really help. With Kerio Control it's basically "find out for yourself."

We've also had some problems with how to set the rules, but that's when more than one rule is overlapping and cancels out all the other rules. However, that's more our fault.

I have been using Kerio Control for around six years.

It's pretty stable. We had some problems with Kerio Control virtual appliances. If it was running more than 20 days, it would become really slow and sometimes it would just stop working. When we rebooted the solution it would come back up. But that was something that was happening a year-and-a-half ago. Since then, we haven't had any more problems with it. 

We had a few solutions that just went corrupt. We're not sure if that was the disk or Kerio itself. We always have an installation of the virtual appliance on the server, so we can set up a new one, load the backup back in, and be up and running again in 15 minutes.

It's been a while since we contacted support, but back when we did it was pretty hard to get a hold of someone. We didn't get a lot of feedback. Most of the time, it was, "Look at the documentation." It was hard to get someone to look over our shoulder and help us with the problem. I think that was before GFI took over.

We did not have a previous solution. 

As I said, if there were best practices or a template, the setup would be a lot easier because you start and then you change the setup according to what you think is right. But later on, when you encounter problems and look in the documentation, you see that another way is better. That was a bit of a problem when setting up. It all works, but in managing or adding rules, for example, or we just didn't do it properly. It was a bit of trial and error and that was a problem. It's too much trial and error when you start.

Deployment time, for some customers, is fairly quick. A basic setup can be up and running in 15 or 30 minutes. With other customers that have a lot of rules we do testing so it could take three or four hours.

For our implementation strategy, we just look at what the client wants. For some clients, we have a basic template now, where we always use a backup from an existing Kerio. If it's a new customer, we check if we have an existing Kerio that's pretty much the same, or we just do it from scratch if there aren't too many rules or networking behind it.

We see ROI because the ease of use is a lot better, so we spend less time on maintenance, administrating, changing rules, and checking usage.

If you have a lot of users, the licensing can be a bit of a problem because we have a lot of customers who don't use the user feature, but we have five devices per user, and we have to extend the license every time. The fixed model of users and devices is a bit of a problem for us. We want to be able to expand it fast and not have to contact our supplier first to get a license. That takes another one or two days and the customer is waiting.

It might be better if they offered a fixed monthly or yearly price instead of the user-based price. That's really keeping us from deploying with some of our smaller customers or customers that have a more dynamic user base. If they had a larger fixed price with unlimited users or devices, that would help. Now, it's five users each time. A pack of 100 or 200 users for a certain price would make it more dynamic and user-scalable.

We looked at pfSense and some paid firewall solutions, but in terms of how user-friendly it is for our employees and my colleagues, and how well we could manage it from a remote portal, Kerio Control was better, in our opinion.

Kerio Control is a nice-to-have for a small business like ours.

My advice would be to look at best practices or get someone to show you how to properly set it up before you try anything and it gets too messy. The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is to look out when it comes to firewall rules. Don't use too many firewall rules or content rules because it can get really messy, really quickly, if you don't have a decent strategy for that.

We always try to use auto-update, so most of the time we're on the most recent version. We have some examples where we use Kerio Control aboard ships where the bandwidth is really limited. In those cases we use our own timeframe to update Kerio Control, but it's normally done within a month or two, so most of them are up to date.

We haven't seen anything yet in the antivirus and we haven't had any problems with malware with our systems. I don't know if malware is being detected that well, because sometimes the clients still have some malware. I don't know if it's because it's an HTTPS site or something else.

In our company, most of the work with Kerio is done by about 10 people. Everyone does the same tasks: administrating, changing rules, and installing new Kerios. I work on it in my role as a system admin team lead and developer. As of late, I've been more of a developer than administrator. The others are system administrators, business consultants, and there are two other developers.

We use the product for cybersecurity. 

The trial product is very good. It provides us with feasibility regarding cyber privacy. 

The pricing of the product can be improved. The trial duration of the product should also be extended. 

I have been using the solution for six months. 

The solution is highly scalable; I would rate scalability a nine out of ten. There are around one thousand users of this solution in our organization. 

The technical support from KerioControl is very helpful. I would rate technical support a nine out of ten. 

Positive

The installation of the product is very easy. We have five technical engineers on our team for maintenance and troubleshooting. 

I would recommend KerioControl to other users, as we are trying to bring the product to our customers. We will also try to expand the number of users in our organization. I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I have had a few issues with HTTPS decryption. The solution also does not show the actual user's Internet usage. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

I did not face any issues with stability while using the tool's trial version. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use cases are for internet connectivity, security, and VPNs.

The VPN connections have improved my organization. It also means that I can manage security more easily.

The most valuable feature is the VPN. It enables us to do remote work. 

I use the geo IP filtering a lot. 

We also like the security. We can control what sites users can go to and we can make sure that where they're going is appropriate and that it's work-related.

Quality of service and bandwidth management need improvement. It just doesn't seem granular in that.

The denial of service could also be improved. There recently was a big issue with denial of service attacks and it was a bit laborious.

I have been using Kerio Control since 2016. 

It's stable and we rarely have any reliability issues.

It is scalable up to a point that then you might have to use a user faster, bigger one, but on the whole, it is scalable. It's because based most installations I have are over 300. Whereas if they start to get really big, you'll need to increase the model to the next model up.

In my company, it's me that manages and installs them all. We install, manage, and offer basic management and support.

The environments we've installed for can go from three to 50 users.

We've never had any problems with it not being able to manage the traffic.

The GFI technical support is average. The speed of response sometimes is not very fast. Sometimes they take a while to resolve an issue. For example, I've got an issue that's not been resolved for three months now, meaning that the box, the unit isn't performing as it should do.

My clients generally replace solutions like SonicWall and Fortinet with Kerio but sometimes they don't have a firewall at all, so we set them up with their first firewall.

It's easier when all our customers are using the same firewall. It makes it easier for us to manage them across the board. We use Kerio across the board.

We used to use a lot of Fortinet but now we've replaced that with Kerio because of the support and price, although now the support is not so good. The price is fair and the features are all pretty much the same.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a bit tricky because I do it a lot, but it's pretty straightforward. It has a Wizard if you need it, but I don't need it anymore. I know what I'm doing. I find it quite easy to set up.

A basic deployment takes an hour. Just the box standards are set out for everybody, and then if they need something specific, we'll add it in afterward. But a straightforward, standard, basic setup takes about an hour.

We have a unified implementation strategy that we start with and then we tweak it if need be. We don't use MyKerio to put a standard implementation across all of them.

Our standard implementation strategy is to implement dual internet connections, standards, and standard traffic rules with VPN access.

At the end of the day, our customers are being managed, looked after, and they're secure, so they're happy.

The licensing is a bit of an issue. People don't like to have to buy user licenses. They think they should be able to buy the box and be able to use it. Licensing is a bit old fashioned in terms of the fact that if they don't renew the license that box becomes useless. People really don't like that. Then they can't use it anymore.

My advice would be to make sure you've got an internet connection. The first thing you have to do is register the user on the internet and then if you get to a new installation where you're setting them up from scratch, you're going to struggle because with the new Kerio unit, the first thing it needs to do is connect to the internet and it can't do that if you haven't set it up. It's best to get it set up before you install it on site.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using the solution is not to assume everything is running okay because it might not be. The main reason is because of the denial of service not being up to scratch. You have to make sure that their connections aren't being kept of denial of service effects. That's the problem right now. I would say denial of service is probably one of the weakest areas.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.