Azure Application Gateway vs. pfSense

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Application Gateway
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall.N/A
pfSense
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
$179
per appliance
Pricing
Azure Application GatewaypfSense
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
SG-1100
$179
per appliance
SG-2100
$229
per appliance
SG-3100
$399
per appliance
SG-5100
$699
per appliance
XG-7100-DT
$899
per appliance
XG-7100-1U
$999
per appliance
XG-1537
$1,949
per appliance
XG-1541
$2,649
per appliance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Application GatewaypfSense
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Application GatewaypfSense
Features
Azure Application GatewaypfSense
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Azure Application Gateway
-
Ratings
pfSense
8.4
16 Ratings
3% below category average
Identification Technologies00 Ratings8.013 Ratings
Visualization Tools00 Ratings8.413 Ratings
Content Inspection00 Ratings8.015 Ratings
Policy-based Controls00 Ratings8.516 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP00 Ratings6.712 Ratings
Firewall Management Console00 Ratings9.415 Ratings
Reporting and Logging00 Ratings8.316 Ratings
VPN00 Ratings9.016 Ratings
High Availability00 Ratings9.415 Ratings
Stateful Inspection00 Ratings9.214 Ratings
Proxy Server00 Ratings7.514 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure Application GatewaypfSense
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.6 out of 10
Sophos UTM
Sophos UTM
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.6 out of 10
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.4 out of 10
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure Application GatewaypfSense
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(8 ratings)
9.5
(28 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.8
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Application GatewaypfSense
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
I believe PFSense is well suited for both home lab environments as well as up to small to mid-size business environments on a tight budget. However, I would implore that anything in production requires the use of the authorized hardware that PFSense sells to receive support. However, in my experience, PFSense is a solid set-and-forget firewall solution.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management.
  • With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
  • Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
  • Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.
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Cons
Microsoft
  • Live examples in the Azure documentation
  • Application Gateway UI Blade in Azure Portal can be streamlined
  • Have more advanced feature set as WAF (Web Application Firewall)
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
  • I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
  • When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
  • I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
  • I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
  • I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.
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Usability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
The pfSense UI is easy to navigate and pretty go look at. It is much better than some high dollar firewalls that just throw menus you you. The pfSense UI is quick and responsive and makes sense 99% of the time. Changes are committed quickly and the hardware rarely requires a reboot. It just runs.
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Support Rating
Microsoft
I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and Azure Traffic Manager) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features. Azure Firewall, although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN interoperability, non-subscription based pricing, auditability, not relying on the infrastructure of a third party, more transparency of what's actually going on, easier to deploy replacements if hardware fails. Additionally, the NAT management for pfSense seems to be a bit better, as you can NAT between any network segment and not just the LAN segments out the WAN interfaces.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Positive : Improved performance and scalability
  • Positive : Better and enhanced Security
  • Positive : Efficiency
  • Negative: Cost
  • Negative: More resources to manage.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
  • pfSense can be installed on commodity hardware with no licensing fees. With a simple less than 10 minute restore time, on most hardware, it's an extremely inexpensive way to achieve the same results that some of the more expensive vendors provide.
  • The easy to use interface has allowed configuration management to be preformed by lower level technicians with quick and easy training.
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