Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management vs. pfSense

Scenarios most suited - 1) All the Cyber Security focused development environments 2) Definitely a must for Financial Clients since it deals with live money transactions - Hence it is imperative to keep the Network and tech asset environment secure, and compliant to standards 3) IAM is another area where it plays an IMP part - For eg one of our healthcare clients where they wanted to restrict access 4) Dashboards are also great, we can share the results to GISO/CISO level folks - Custom dashboard feature

Incentivized

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.

• Integration with public cloud providers.
• Rich UI with great dashboards.
• Great assets inventory.
• Clarity module.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• There is not a comprehensive amount of documentation on how to set up best practices.
• Our initial set up assistance from Proofpoint approved vendor did not go smoothly.
• The ability to add more customized widgets in the main overview screen would be helpful.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Is easy to use, and the standad configuration is well prepared.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I haven't dealt so much with support but we are enjoying the tool!

Incentivized

pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.

Incentivized

First and foremost reason of our client selecting CheckPoint CloudGuard Posture Management / Dome9 was because they already had CheckPoint Firewalls which are in active use e.g. R75.40 and R82.x products. Customization Vs these other Vendors is another great asset Reporting is one more standout feature, + Multi-cloud capabilities Centralized dashboarding is smooth to navigate as compared to other Vendors Syslog handling is much better as compared to some other vendors , Memory and space issues if planned well are less

Incentivized

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.

• For production environments it is worth the investment.
• Getting to know how many assets you have helps with cost savings.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized