Cyberoam vs. pfSense

Our organization found that Cyberoam is a cost-effective solution compared to other vendors. Cyberoam was having issues with SSO for Web Filtering. For, web filtering and application blocking, Cyberoam does not contain enough signatures or data so we can not achieve the goal of all of the sites that need to be blocked. Cyberoam is great because of its ease of use 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.

• Accurate and precise bandwidth shaping
• Utm features are completely reliable,uses mainly for conducting exams smoothly.

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

• Without mentioning an alternative brand, there is another leading company who has updated with firewall UI quite a bit. They offer an expanded line-up to meet a wider array of needs including specific appliances for web caching, proxy servers, and other products that have the same and familiar UI across the products. Each of the products does have some overlap so that customers can choose the right appliance for their use case.
• After being acquired by Sophos, we saw our year-over-year costs escalate significantly since our original maintenance contract. They should consider revisiting the pricing, especially for education.
• They should consider a current market analysis and see how the market is changing and adapting with other lower cost appliances for their product line up.

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

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

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

Incentivized

The main factor is cost, as we are a startup organization. That's the main reason we choose Cyberoam stacks up against other network security services.

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.

• Considerable change was noted in the utilization of administrators after switching from the software firewall.
• It is relatively better priced when compared to fortigate.
• Better log handling after the switch.

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