Check Point CloudGuard vs. pfSense

Checkpoint Cloud Guard Native Security Platform is much better in native cloud infra security requirements. It works well, and the manageability of said product is good. But If you are having some hybrid kind of environment, it is not suitable, and the products have more complexity to deploy. There are so many other players to do well in this segment.

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.

• Advanced Threat protection via Check Point CloudGuard proven ThreatCloud intelligence feeds for malicious IP's is a nice feature.
• We have not set up the cloud bots auto-remediation functionality yet, but from initial testing, it looks to be something worth utilizing.
• Having reporting tie in's with our ServiceNow asset management platform is very handy.

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

• Support Services - Support during implementation
• Proof-of-concept - Needs to more detailed
• Troubleshooting multi-cloud/ vendor issues
• Should contain all the compliance standards - NIST, HIPPA, FedRAMP

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

Checkpoint support is great. They provide great SLAs and they comply with service times accordingly.

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

Most products have their pros and cons but Dome9 does everything Evident.io and Redlock can do and more. Evident was a good tool but merging the two products into one complicated things.

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.

• Significant $$$ cost savings as compared to other competitors in the market
• Long term contracting also helped in cost savings and good ROI - 750k USD approx
• Multi-vendor and Multi-cloud capabilities also helped us forecast the capex well
• No need of any other IAM solution - Some cost savings in that area as well for us,

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