Netgate pfSense surpasses its competitors by offering a comprehensive open-source firewall platform with robust security features, superior performance, ease of customization, and a supportive community, making it a preferred choice for both novices and experienced network administrators.
I would choose pfSense over Fortinet FortiGate due to the exceptional customer service, user-friendly interface, and comprehensive community support highlighted in the user reviews.
PfSense and OPNsense are both open-source firewalls aiming to secure your network. pfSense offers paid options for additional support and features (pfSense Plus). pfSense offers a wider range of features and a larger community, but might have a steeper learning curve. OPNsense provides a clean interface and built-in security features, but its community and documentation are smaller.
IPFire enhances network security and protects against cyber threats. It is highly effective at providing secure remote access to networks. Users appreciate its ease of use and flexibility to tailor the solution to their needs. IPFire is also praised for its reliable network monitoring and traffic-shaping capabilities. Its most valuable features include efficient firewall capabilities, customizable options, a user-friendly interface, and reliable network performance.
Smoothwall Firewall is used in educational institutions for web filtering and network security. Users praise its effective content filtering, robust reporting, and strong technical support. They appreciate its user-friendly deployment but desire more frequent updates, detailed analytics, and better documentation. Some have experienced stability issues and challenging initial setup, yet find it practical for schools.
Hillstone Networks’ X7180 data center firewall offers outstanding performance, reliability, and scalability, for high-speed service providers, large enterprises and carrier networks. It provides flexible firewall security for multi-tenant cloud-based security-as-a-service environments. The X7180 platform is based on Hillstone’s Elastic Security Architecture (ESA), which offers highly scalable virtual firewalls, exceptional firewall throughput, massive concurrent sessions and very high new sessions per second. The X7180 also supports Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), next generation application control and Quality of Service (QoS). The system delivers exceptional performance in a small form factor with low power requirements.
