pfSense vs. Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
pfSense
Score 8.5 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
Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway (replacing the former McAfee Web Gateway) is presented by the vendor as high-performance on-premises web security, that can be deployed as dedicated hardware or a virtual machine. With it, users can enforce internet-use policies, analyze the nature and intent of content and active code entering the network, and use DLP technology to scan outbound traffic.N/A
Pricing
pfSenseSkyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Editions & Modules
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
pfSenseSkyhigh Secure Web Gateway
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
pfSenseSkyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Considered Both Products
pfSense
Chose pfSense
Both products listed above, are very great solutions, but payed ones. If you are looking for open source firewall solution, pfSense is the one. Based on FreeBSD, it has strong security features and is very easy to deploy, configure and manage. pfSense also plays network simple …
Chose pfSense
PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements.
Chose pfSense
Fortigate offers an extensive set of features including the Unified Threat Management and a lot of FortiGuard services . pfSense is extremely modular, probably because of its open source "flavour"m but relies on community support. Fortinet ROI depends on the reduced …
Chose pfSense
pfSense always wins in the licensing realm. It requires little or no licensing to run and run forever. No ids/ips licensing, no advanced feature license, no remote access licensing. Download the community edition or buy the Netgate hardware and you are set going forward. There …
Chose pfSense
PfSense beats all other solutions at its price point, hands-down. You can get more features with far less performance, or same performance for much higher cost.
Chose pfSense
pfSense does almost all what the other brands do and the CE Edition is free even if complete.
Chose pfSense
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 …
Chose pfSense
Overall, pfSense is the most complete solution in terms of features included even though it currently lack of a centralised management interface.The Ubiquiti firewall offering is often appealing being well integrated within the Ubiquiti dashboard and it is often a solution of …
Chose pfSense
We were using Sophos XG Firewall in our environment before but we need a product that is customizable & provides low cost high security features. pfSense provided us high security features with customizable options as it's kernel is based on freeBSD.
Chose pfSense
We were using Sophos XG firewall in our environment but when it comes to cost it's more expensive with limited features. After using [pfSense] we are getting more security features at less cost. After pfSense provides a bundle of security features such as anti-spamming, …
Chose pfSense
pfSense offers more options and scales very easily.
Chose pfSense
pfSense is just a more flexible, lower-cost solution—it can be installed (if you wish) on just about any x86 hardware or even virtual machines - the community edition is free and so enables rapid prototyping and low-cost prototyping and lab build out—something that isn't …
Chose pfSense
pfSense is a lot cheaper and has higher firewall throughput per dollar than "enterprise" network appliances. It's also significantly easier to configure and learn. It may not have some of the "enterprise" features or the support level that someone like Cisco has, but for small …
Chose pfSense
pfSense itself is free and can be installed on just about any hardware so from a hardware cost perspective it can beat out anybody. In terms of features it's above many pro-sumer/small business solutions like Ubiquiti. It can't really stand against high-end gear like Cisco but …
Chose pfSense
First of all, I don't need to be a Cisco professional to manage VPN, load balance, multiple WAN/LAN, Firewall and etc. pfSense has an easy-to-use web interface and I can do everything and add packaged add-on services. Moreover, for Small & Medium Enterprise, IT budget is …
Chose pfSense
Pfsense seemed to always be cheaper and just as good as its competitors.
Chose pfSense
I have not seen a single thing that these other products do that pfSense does not. In fact, the performance/throughput of pfSense is better in my opinion.
Chose pfSense
While you can get the performance out of other products, pfSense offers the unique ability to put other services on the same device. Products such as Untagle's NG Firewall and SonicWall's TZ series offer cost effective options for firewall and VPN services, having incoming load …
Chose pfSense
pfSense is a new and innovative platform that has learned from the errors of older systems, which helps it cover the needs that aren't covered by Smoothwall.

Chose pfSense
Before pfSense we were using consumer and small business rated network appliances from Linksys, Cisco, Buffalo and Netgear. We were replacing them on average of every 6-12 months because they'd fail or would offer poor wifi availability.

Switching to pfSense allowed us to use …
Chose pfSense
It's an open source solution can support from 50 to 700 user without sweating and with the half of the standard bundle investment that will take to deploy a Fortigate UTM, or a Cisco ASA, also a Sophos UTM that are quite remarkable units but to pFSense saves you money and will …
Chose pfSense
Real competition was between Pfsense and OpnSense that integrates first the bootstrap Twitter framework. But with OpSense there are configurations that create some problems with a specific client (we've experienced that by creating an IPSec tunnel both with OpSense and …
Chose pfSense
I've used a number of routers like Cisco, Sonicwall, Juniper, Home based routers, etc. pfSense is like most routers but with the benefit of load balancing and multi-wan. Well many support multi-wan but load balancing is usually a separate device like an BIGiP F5 or Cisco CSS.
Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Chose Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Zscaler Internet Access
Chose Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
The configuration of the Cisco Secure web appliance of even worse than the one of Skyhigh's Secure Web Gateway. The detecction rate was slightly higher but the visibility worse.
Chose Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Kind of flexibility in Deployment and Customization which we get with McAfee Web Gateway was the driving factor we went with it and it has met our expectations. After implementing the McAfee Web Gateway, the count of the service desk tickets raised by users related to the web …
Chose Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
We selected McAfee Web Gateway because is one of the best solutions from the market on the moment. The price is very good. Excellent integration with another solution from McAfee that we have implemented. The speed of the protection from my point of view is one of the best …
Chose Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Both had comparable feature sets with Web Gateway at lesser cost.
Features
pfSenseSkyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
pfSense
8.9
Ratings
3% above category average
Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
-
Ratings
Identification Technologies8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Visualization Tools8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Content Inspection9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy-based Controls8.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP7.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Firewall Management Console9.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting and Logging8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
VPN9.10 Ratings00 Ratings
High Availability9.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Stateful Inspection10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Proxy Server8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
pfSenseSkyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Small Businesses
Sophos UTM
Sophos UTM
Score 8.5 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.1 out of 10
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Score 9.1 out of 10
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
pfSenseSkyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.7
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
pfSenseSkyhigh Secure Web Gateway
Likelihood to Recommend
pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free.
Read full review
Provides a lot of general protection for my business PC, including spam and email filtering, as well as email protection. Internet protection at real-time is very effective. There is nothing negative I can say about McAfee Web Gateway. It's the best security software ever for small and big companies. Buy with trust.
Read full review
Pros
  • 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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  • Very flexible rule configuration for tiered access. With AD integration, easily allow Internet access based on groups.
  • SSL inspection of web content. URL categories can be exempted from inspection such as financial or health.
  • Customizable block pages. Allows you to place your policy statement on the block page as well as explanations for why a page is blocked.
Read full review
Cons
  • There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done.
  • Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying.
Read full review
  • UI
  • Malware detection
  • reporting
Read full review
Usability
pfSense can be a very elementary firewall but can also be as comples as you want, according your needs. I'd always reccomend a HA solution when used in a company and, for bigger companies, commercial license is recommended. It's also very adptable to everyone's needs.
Read full review
Excellent products based on all the needs we had. Most of our use cases has been able to implement. DLP is kind of difficult to implement but possible. However you needs a big team to handle the tools as it's capabilities and management is complex. Nevertheles you can find a way to leverage all the funcionality when needed.
Read full review
Support Rating
pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements.
Read full review
Kind of flexibility in Deployment and Customization which we get with McAfee Web Gateway was the driving factor we went with it and it has met our expectations. After implementing the McAfee Web Gateway, the count of the service desk tickets raised by users related to the web service issues have been decreased. And it has protected our office users and remote users as well.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • pfSense has only had positive impacts on our company. We are not a huge company so not having to buy licenses to get all these features have been excellent.
  • I was not around when our current sysadmin decided to use pfSense, but I am assuming from day one it was probably a 100% return on investment since it does everything we need it to and it was open source software.
Read full review
  • Unify SASE solutions
  • SaaS based
  • Single client
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ScreenShots