Check Point 4000 Appliances vs. CrowdSec

If you have middle-sized and large-sized organizations and you have a very good budget for network security then you can install this firewall. Sandboxing and ips features are very useful and you can use them for deep packet inspection and protect your organization from external attacks.

Since I've only used CrowdSec in a homelab/small-medium sized business setup, that's really the only market I can safely recommend it and say it's well suited for, because I don't know how much it would cost to run it in an enterprise environment. I've heard some pricing and how they plan on rolling out a subscription model, but it's still in talks. Either way, if you have publicly exposed web applications hosted locally or on a virtual private server, then CrowdSec should be part of every virtual machine and/or network. Even with the lmited number of filter you get out of the free subscription, it provides a nice layer of constantly updated data,

Incentivized

• If you have critical data then you can use this firewall for secure your organization
• You can also use for cloud security
• If you want the deep packet inspection then this is one of the best firewall for you.

• Provides great integrations with tools you already use, such as fail2ban, Cloudflare, WordPress, NGINX, Linux Firewalls, etc.
• Lightweight agents can run on individual servers and report to a main security engine so that if there's an attack on one server and a block is implemented, the entire network can be protected
• There are a lot of ways to receive alerts and store logs
• CrowdSec Central API is a nice way to manage everything externally

Incentivized

• Steep learning curve for admins
• No packet tracer application like the ASA to test flows prior to putting in new rules, etc.
• Policy packages are all or nothing. I cannot uninstall or turn off a piece of the overall policy, it's all or nothing.

Incentivized

• Getting CrowdSec to run on OPNsense can be a challenge, but that's also a limitation of the OS
• You can only subscribe to a couple of feeds before paying an unknown amount of money that's part of their "Enterprise" package. So, there could be better transparency.

Incentivized

WatchGuard was a little more like a Sonicwall, and we felt the Soho-type interface wasn't what we wanted out of a security product. The anti-malware and spyware products were not nearly as good or pronounced as the checkpoint products. Secondly, we have to have the checkpoint for access to our parent company's networks.

Incentivized

• We have not seen a zero-day exploit since implementing the anti-spyware, anti-malware, and URL filtering functionality
• We have not seen a successful intrusion into our systems since the implementation of our checkpoint 4000
• We have had this firewall for 5+ years, and it still has much life left in it.

Incentivized

• It flat-out blocks malicious IPs from accessing any PC on my network.
• It's free-tier makes this a no brainer to implement

Incentivized